TROUBLED VISION: INTERROGATING THE VISUAL PROTOCOLS OF 20 TH CENTURY ETHNOGRAPHIC LITERARY AND CINEMATIC TRAVELOGUES By Faith Kirk A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of English Doctor of Philosophy 201 5 ABSTRACT TROUBLED VISION: INTERROGATING THE VISUAL PROTOCOLS OF 20 th CENTURY ETHNOGRAPHIC LITERARY AND CINEMATIC TRAVELOGUES By Faith Kirk This dissertation investigates the twentieth century American and British preoccupation with ethnographic looking by reading comparatively across literary travelogues, documentary films, and anthropological ethnography. I argue that twentieth - are not merely s imilar thematically and ideologically, but are linked through a shared set of formal operations. By applying methods of film analysis to written texts and methods of literary analysis to film texts, I illustrate the convergence of ethnographic texts around the point of view of the participant - observer. Instead of considering participant - observation as a methodology reserved solely for anthropologists, I suggest that the participant - observer is a point of view central to cinematic spectatorship as well as tw entieth - century ethnographic literary travel Copyright by FAITH K IRK 2015 iv For my daughter, Mirabelle Lee Olson v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS No dissertation is a solitary work and this one is no exception. I would like to thank Ellen McCallum for teaching me how to close read and how to write persuasive academic prose. Her enthusiastic guidance from the inception of this ambitious, and at times unwieldy, project made all the difference. The generous and insightful readings of Stephen Rachman, Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai, and Joshua Yumibe pushed me to define my relationship to the multiple fields and conversations upon which this dissertat intellectually rigorous questions were formative at the early stages of this project, as were the astute suggestions of my writing group: Hannah Allen, Nicole McCleese, and Jennifer Gower - Toms. I am deeply grateful to my family, Nancy Althouse, Karen Kirk, Evonne Olson and Tom Olson, for their tireless interest in my work and their encouragement throughout this process. And finally, I am profoundly indebted to Nels Olson for all the conversations about these ideas ov er the years, the constant intellectual challenge and the unfailing support. v i TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1 22 CONVERGENC E: CINEMATIC, ANTHROPOLOGICAL, AND LI TERARY VISIONS OF THE PRIMITIVE ...... ........................ 22 NEW VISIONS OF THE REAL .. 28 BRONISLAW MALINOWSKI S CINEMATIC VISION 32 D.H. LAWRENCE S ETHNOGRAPHIC GAZE ... 43 ROBERT FLAHERTY S CINEMATIC ETHNOGRAPHY .. .. 57 NATIVE IMAGININGS . . 74 76 76 FROM CAMBRIDGE TO THE KALAHARI 81 A VISION FROM ABOVE ... ... 89 LITERARY VISIONS ... ... 109 SEEING THE JU/ HOANSI ON FILM . .. 125 VISUAL TROUBLE ... ... 14 1 CH ...1 43 LISTENING TO NATIVES SPEAK: THE 143 SPEAKING WITH THE NATIVE GIRL ... .. 15 2 SPEAK ING NEARBY NATIVES .. ... . 169 SPEAKING AS THE NATIVE ... ... 185 .. . 201 2 04 1 I NTRODUCTION Several years ago, I boarded a bus at the base of what is known in northern New Mexico as the Ench anted Mesa and waited, along with some twenty other passengers, to climb the winding road that leads up to Acoma Pueblo, the oldest continually inhabited Native American village in the American Southwest. Our tour guide was a teenage girl who proudly infor med us that she was to inher or Old Acoma, on top of the mesa. Wearing an elaborate turquoise pendant over a Dallas Cowboys football jersey, she dutifully irector John Ford built this African Sunset here. Before that, we had to walk up the narrow steps carved into the side of the cliff walls and carry water an d supplies up with As the bus rounded the bend in the road, the adobe houses clustered on top of the mesa came into view along with the heavy - duty Chevy pickup trucks parked everywhere and anywhere they could fit. Filing out of the bus, we proceeded to see the s ights: here was a traditional stone oven where people can bake bread if they do not feel like buying it at the local Walmart; there was a cemetery for the Acoma victims of Spanish Conquistador Juan de Oñate; here was a table displaying famous Acoma pottery for sale; there was the Catholic mission with the impressive iron bell that had to be carried up the sheer rock cliffs in the seventeenth century by the Acoma people themselves. Our tour guide encouraged us to sample a local treat chopped pickles mixed wi th electric blue Kool - Aid powder. Everyone smiled and nodded their heads. No one bought any. As we moved through the tour, women manning the pottery tables complained to our told her. 2 followed her to the mission where a religious celebration was underway. We were told we could enter but we could not take any pictures and should not s tay too long. A group of men stood smoking cigarettes and watching us gathering outside the church, laughing at us and theatrically side the dimly - lit building, I could make out a doll dressed as the V irgin set on top of a bare wooden table at the front of the room before we were herded out to stand and watch the procession leaving the church, chanting and stepping slowly and rhythmically. I stood watching silently, waiting to board the bus and head bac About a year later, I found myself mired once again in the troubles of the ethnographic Nanook of the North in a film studies class kn ows that students often find the film monotonous and difficult to decipher. To - rehearsed critical history: I described screened the family scene set inside an igloo and reminded them that the structure was only partially constructed so that the camera and crew could fit inside, a scenario that was good for filming but left Allakariallak and his family exposed to the elements; I told them that Allakariallak died of starvation shortly after filming. I had hoped to complicate simplistic assumptions about documentary realism and animate a discussion about the ethical implications of et hnographic looking but what I got was quite different. One student rejected the film outright and demanded to know why it was still being shown. If the gaze of t we easily recognize the ideological problems the film perpetuates, he argued, there was little to 3 be gained by subjecting that point of view to further critique. It is typical of undergraduate students to deny history, particularly histories of racism, and the effects of ideology on their own viewing practices. But what happens when we take these questions seriously? Why should w e still care about Nanook and the sp ectator that the film elicits? Why do we teach texts that enact the ethnographic gaze and then ask students to rehearse a critique of that gaze an d its implications? What might be the precise purpose of those scholarly practices, both inside and outside th e classroom? These two stories can only begin to suggest the complex historical and theoretical knot this dis sertation seeks to untangle. On the one hand, the visual practices we now understand as ld aptly b with its disorienting juxtaposition of the ordinary and the fantastical, rehearses some of travel essays in whi ch he describes his visits to there for tourists i experience of witnessing Native American history and culture, motivated, perhaps perversely, by my interest in critiquing the ethnographic tourist gaze. Strangely, as anyone who has taught staged i n the very classrooms where we work to reveal and then critique the ideological framing of that gaze. Both inside and outside the twenty - first - central to the ways Americans learn abou t our own history, no matter how self - aware those looking practices may be. 4 On the other hand, we are living in a moment where, thanks to decades of post - colonial and feminist ideological critique, the problems with ethnographic looking relations are g laring. When confronted with texts that ask us to look at so - critique the paternalistic, objectifying gaze that those texts require us to assume. In my own re - telling of what is now a familiar story about seeing must always be bracketed by quotation marks that grammatically signal the impossibility of seen a white tourist, a film crew, or an anthropologist, has been thoroughly debunked. Just as the Acoma that twenty - first - century - tourists visit is already framed by a history of ethnographi c looking practices, the Nanook of the North that twenty - first - century - students see is already framed by a history of ideological analysis. In short, observing people once considered The questions I take up in this dissertation are rooted in an analysis of what is now eldwork, writing, or filmmaking. Instead, the term now describes the visual relationships at work in a more diffuse, wide - ranging set of representational practices. In this dissertation, I consider the ethnographic gaze to be a particular set of practices for visualizing racial and cultural difference. Allison my an alysis (xxix). Her deceptively straightforward definition foregrounds two aspects of 5 between the observer and the observed and second, that it is a mode of g purposely by an observer. For me, the visual practices of the ethnographic observer can never be mistaken for a passive mode of spectatorship. Whether the ethnographic observer explicitly considers their looking practices anthropological or not, all ethnographic gazing is an active process of interpretation. o p ophilia , c onvenient shorthand for describing a set of visual relationships that position the one who looks of feminist, psychoanalytic, and postcolonial analyses of visual culture and its effects. This dissertation is an attempt to re - invigorate an analysis of the gaze by thinking differently about the formal protocols of ethnographic looking in twentieth - century writing and film. Reading comparatively a cross literary travelogues, documentary films, and anthropological ethnographic writing, I argue that twentieth - merely similar thematically and ideologically, but are linked through a shared set of formal o perations. To stake this claim, each chapter of the dissertation strategically compares a triangulation of three texts: one literary travelogue, one anthropological ethnography , and one ethnographic documentary. Reading these texts together as case studies , I have tried to do more produced by history and ideology. By applying methods of film analysis to written texts and 6 methods of literary analysis to film texts, I seek to illuminate the surprising convergence of these clusters of ethnographic texts around point of view. Certainly, the looking relations I describe in the anthropological, film, and literary texts I have assembled here create subjects and objects in ways that are not only troubling but have violent implications. What they also do is create a very specific set of experiences for the spectator turned ethnographic observer. Throughout this dissertation, I seek to re - animate that experience and ask questions not only about its ideological effects on readers and spectators, but also about how that experience works. One of the central claims in this dissertation is that at the most basic level of form, both culture throughout the twentieth century position their spectator or reader from a particular point of view now commonly associated with anthropology: the participant - observer. While most anthropologists credit Bronislaw Malinowski with inventing participa nt - observation and coinin g the term, I suggest that the forefather of twentieth - century ethnography was only one voice in a larger conversation about how best to see y. The counter - that Malinowski was trying to describe. To be immersed in the sensory experience of an e vent, yet at the same time estranged from it e nough to recognize the seams that betray its status as cultural construct is to assume a highly artificial and practically impossible viewing position. The point of view that Malinowski imagines and attempts to show readers in his first major ethnography, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), may have been groundbreaking for anthropology but was it was a mode of spectatorship already emerging in the cinematic language 7 of Am blockbusters Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). By experimenting with editing techniques that would immerse audiences in the world of the film, Grif fith established a cinematic point of view that would dominate Classical Hollywood filmmaking and shift the preferences of American spectators away from non - fiction actualities and travelogues to narrative fe films so compelling for audiences was the unique viewing position that they made available. Through the use of continuity editing principles, primarily the eyeline match and cross - cutting to show parallel action, Griffith encouraged spectators to see from the perspective of the characters in the film and see events that those characters did not witness. These in novations in editing allowed audiences to make sense of increasingly complex narratives onscreen but they also created a new point of view, one which was simultaneously inside the world of the film and the subjectivity of the people who live there and remo ved from that world. By both participating in the psychological and emotional lives of the characters while observing the larger patterns of action, viewers could interpret the event onscreen in more nuanced ways. The historical links between cinema and anthropology are already quite clear. Tom world is the way that they tried to recrea te the pleasures of observation ( 9 - 24). Jennifer Peterson has considered the ways that early non - fiction films framed images of exper ience of t ravel and exploration ( 4). Fatimah Tobing Rony, Assenka Oksiloff, and Allison Griffiths have painstakingly tra ced the links between nineteenth - century discourses of science, race, imperial expansion, and the earliest film images, many of which focus on the bodies of non - white so - both twentieth - century anthropology and cinema emerged as methods of visually investigating 8 the same subject: non - notion that the film image is an index of the real body placed in front of the camera makes early cinema and an emergent twe ntieth - century anthropology conjoined discourses. I argue that the connections between the visual protocols of modern anthropology and cinema do not end with early non - fiction film. Just as there are troubling thematic similarities between the ways a n King Kong Sexual Lives of Savages (1929) - sexualized children, there are formal similarities between the vis ual practices of those texts. We may be more familiar with associating strategies of cinematic realism like the long - fa with the ethnographic gaze (37). What is just as crucial to ethnographic looking are the often invisible editing practices that turn viewers into participant - observers. Perhaps that is why Malinowski was never satisfied with his efforts to capture the lives of Trobr iand Islanders on film . While he brought a camera pictures of his subjects (Young 5) . It seems that the stasis and distance of the photographic still could not approximate the point of view he was trying to inhabit as a researcher and re - crea te for his readers. By itself, isolated from context, a photograph ic portrait can never tell us what the view...[and] realize his vision of his Argonauts 25 ). Where the photographic image freeze s time so that a body or a moment can be inspected in detail, the first moving pictures animated the infinitely reproducible photographic image in an attempt to simulate human vision. The introduction of e diting techni ques that re - ordered time and space transformed the goals of that project from recreating human perception to transcending it. Using similar strategies, both 9 cinema and anthropology sought to extend the capacities of human vision and comprehension of racia Despite the efforts of scholars, writers, and filmmakers to demonstrate the primacy of participant - of the participant - observer had begun to crumble. What had appeared in the early years of the twentieth century to be a radical method of generating new knowledge with unlimited potential now seemed to exemplify the violent limitations of human vision. Decolonization in the wake of World War II, the British and American counter - , heteronormative privilege. Within academia, where anthropologists and ethnographic documentary filmmakers found legitimacy and funding, a series of seismic theoretical shifts that would call into question the formal strategies of ethnographic representation. Jacques Derrida systematically deconstructed the authority of Levi - structuralist au thority, Michel Foucault set about historicizing modernity and its institutional and Edward Said - observation in its many guises had p roved an extraordinarily fruitful mechanism for producing knowledge in the first half of the century, deconstructing that point of view, in all its incarnations, would be a project just as generative. My second main claim in this dissertation is that the pronounced interest in voice that response to the epistemological problems bound up in the ethnographic looking that had preoccupied travel writers, ethnographers, and filmmakers for most of the twentieth century. Because the ethnographic gaze could no longer to be trusted as a method of investigating and 10 of culture tur historically been the subjects of ethnographic study: non - white and indigenous peoples. Anthropologists embraced polyvocal ethnographies that incorporated the transcribed speech of th - consciously showed how the interpretation of culture is the result of collaboration between ethnographer and subject. Subsequently, the life - history (an old anthropological genre) re - emerged as a popular form for representi ng the experiences of ethnographic subjects as they recounted them. Literary studies took up the task of deconstructing the authority of a canon dominated by white, male writers, re - thinking how the voices of marginalized writers could be incorporated int o the university curriculum. Postmodern writers like Caryl Phillips, V.S. Naipul, and Jamaica Kincaid examined and critiqued the privilege inscribed in the literary travelogue they had inherited. Documentary filmmakers rejected the didactic, voice - of - God n arration exemplified by mid - century ethnographic documentaries and adopted increasingly self - reflexive strategies to represent the voices of their subjects more fairly. by a flurry of experimentation with voice ( Introduction 3). Much of the late twentieth - the authors of ethnographic texts had changed dramatically. Non - white and indigenous people, many of whom came from cultures who had been objectified by the ethnographic gaze and all of whom had been marginalized and oppressed by the racism inscribed in those looking practices, were producing ethnographies, documentary films, and travelogues on a wider sc ale than ever before. If ethnography is largely a discourse that constructs the self, as feminist anthropologist Lila Abu - Lughod has argued, it makes sense that ethnographic representation should change 11 with it is authors ( Can There Be 24). I do not inten d to suggest that indigenous anthropologists, of critique. Clearly, anthropologists have very different rhetorical contexts and strategies for their projec ts than postmodern travelogue writers. It is undeniable, however, that the late twentieth think about this profound shift toward voice, particularly in ethn ographic representation, is in relationship to an earlier preoccupation with the visual. The participant - observer has certainly not disappeared from anthropology, documentary, or literary writing. Anthropology, more than any other discipline, has underta ken the work of critiquing and recuperating participant - observation through a sustained analysis of its central about de - naturalizing the vision of the participant - observer by situating ethnography as a writing practice closely linked with literary writing. Historian of Anthropology George W. Stocking subjected the ethnography of canonical forefathers of the field to critical analysis, exposing how th anthropologists foreground their identities in their writing and largely consider the ethnography that they end up producing from their fieldwork to be rhetorically, historica lly and generically to so - called objective truths ( Writing Culture 6). When twenty - first - century anthropologists enter the field, they do so with the knowl edge that what they see is always framed by how they see. 12 Ethnographic filmmakers, in particular, have worked to reclaim the potential of the participant - Marshall, David and Judith McDougall, and Les Blank (just to name a few) have all produced films that self - consciously comment on the artifice of their own point of view, fashioning a more self, reflexive mode of ethnographic documentary that attempts to account for its complicity in writing culture. 1 Faye Ginsburg has suggested that indigenous filmmakers strategically use - specific knowledges (40). All of this work attempts to reconfigure ethnographic looking for the twenty first century and mine the gaze of participant - observation for new, perhaps more ethical, ways to generate meaning. As interesting as these efforts to reclaim ethnographic looking may be, they are not my concern in this dissertatio that either attempts to undermine the gaze of the participant - observer or move away from it impl ications: first, it calls into question any understanding of the photographic image as an Next, paying attention to voice necessarily makes visible the construc ted quality of ethnographic representation itself, a characteristic that takes on particular importance in relationship to the 1 Jean Rouch films his subjects watchi ng the first part of his 1961 film ( Chronicle of A Summer ) The Axe Fight compares the unedited footage of an ambiguous conflict th e anthropologists caught on film with the N!ai, Story of a !Kung Woman (1980), Bitter Melons (1971), and particularly A Kalahari Family enous subjects including (1 980) and Familiar Places (1977) incorporate images of themselves filming and interacting Always for Pleasure (1978) and Burden of Dreams (1982) make the process of filmmaking their subject matter. The latter film focu 13 visual trouble associated with the ethnographic gaze. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, ethnographic representation that foc of view and why it matters. If the participant - identity of the observer himself, directing attention to authorial voice provided an innovative reso lution to what was a specifically visual problem. Rather than narrowly focus my analysis by region, historical period, or media, I have purposely adopted a somewhat promiscuous, interdisciplinary lens for this project. Situated at the intersection of lit erary studies, film studies, and visual anthropology, in each chapter of the dissertation I tease out how the texts I examine construct a particular point of view to generate their claims about humanity and history . Ultimately, I trace a history of the eth nographic gaze new set of questions about identity, authenti these decades provide a kind of teleological map of a twentieth - century visual polemic that Perhaps it goes without saying t hat this methodology is highly artificial and limited in scope. L ike all interdisciplinary projects, I necessarily gloss much of the complicated histories of the individual discourses I examine. An unintended consequence of this teleological mapping is tha t it implies that ethnographic looking was solely practiced by Western white, male subjects and that critiques of those looking practices were waged solely by women of color. That is most certainly not the case. A writer like Zora Neale Hurston, for instan ce, studied under American anthropologist Franz Boas before embarking on an ethnographic expedition to collect and preserve African - 14 that trip, Mules and Men (1935), can be read as an early example of self - reflexive ethnographic - glass of Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (1977), anthropologist Pa ul Rabinow discloses his uncomfortable, awkward relationships with his informants and portrays himself as a clumsy, often amateurish traveler, undermining the tone of scholarly expertise he constructs in the ethnography he produced from these experiences, Symbolic Domination (1975). These two examples complicate the notion that ethnographic looking was ever an unconscious, simplistic practice or that self - reflexivity was a late twentieth - century invention. encompass a range of complex racial identities. In doing so, I run the risk of replicating the reductive logic of Western, white paternalism that I critique. Both of these terms are the inheritance of the nineteenth - century discour twentieth centuries to violently homogenize a complex plane of racial and ethnic nuance to a single identity to be neatly categorized and marginalized. Clearly, not all the people who were th e subjects of the ethnographic looking practices I describe in this dissertation were from the same racial and ethnic groups. This dissertation maps the scope of the ethnographic gaze, moving from the Trobriand Islands off Papua New Guinea to Oaxaca in sou thern Mexico, and from Samoa to the Kalahari Desert in Namibia. While the participant - observers I examine here saw Mexicans and Samoans as different , I do not mean to suggest that these groups have much in common besides be ing the subject of a white, Western gaze. By bracketing these terms with quotation marks, I mean to suggest the ways in which the 15 One of my primary assumptions in this diss ertation is that written and cinematic texts share formal properties. I understand literary writing, scholarly writing, and documentary film as heterogeneous textual forms that incorporate descriptive language, actual images, and rhetorical practices of ar rangement to construct visual experiences for readers or spectators. Certainly, watching a film and reading a written text are different experiences. Considering the ways they construct a participant - observer productively de - familiarizes the relationship b etween spectator and reader and opens up an avenue to examine what may otherwise by very counter - intuitive ideas about the most basic formal operations of language, image, and sound. To stake my claims, I draw heavily on a large and unwieldy archive of c ritical work on the ethnographic gaze. To embrace a travel metaphor, I am walking a well - current attempt to think about how ethnographic looking pro 2 foundational to any analysis of the ethnog raphic gaze and its effects (118). To demonstrate their s 1508 painting The Exotic Tribe to build his case that Africa functions as the - century British travelo gues produced the 2 g Orientalist gaze, his ideas created a theoretical language to frame discussions of ethnographic looking. Interestingly, the now - - The Snake Charmer , reproduces the Orienta list gaze that the scholar identifies and critiques. Positioning viewers behind the nude boy displaying the snake to an audience of men, the painting situates spectators as participants in implicit reading of this image as I am to his explicit arguments about Western literature. 16 world for their readers has certainly suffused my own readings of the representational codes of does for modern art and science has been absolute ly foundational to my readings, particularly her Mexico. Informed by deconstruction and postcolonial theory, all of these texts took the departure for a wide - ranging ideological critique. The rigorous analysis of the gaze in film studies is another crucial source for the arguments I make about point of view. Femini st, psychoanalytic analyses of the gaze inscribed - scopophilic positions spectators (7 particularly in the ethnographic documentary film, provides another foundational frame for the formal analysis of non - fiction film. E. Ann Kaplan, Ella Shohat, Caren Kaplan, and Inderpal Grewal merged feminist readings of the gaze with a postcolonial theoretical concern about imperialism and its visual effects. More recent work moves across disciplinary boundaries to read ethnographic representation as a more widespread phenomenon than anthropologists would allow. I draw on Like her, I esentation here as primarily a way of visualizing race that crosses 17 encompasses a wide variety of discourses. 3 nineteenth - century paintings, museum exhibitions, and early cinematic images, both popular and sc ientific, to comparatively between anthropology and art history to stake her cla from contemporary art practices (9). Artist Coco Fusco moves easily between writing and performance to complicate and critique the logic of ethnographic spectacle. While I do not refer explicitly to her work, her ideas and methods has deeply influenced the way I think about the relationship between ethnographic representation and the spectator it imagines and produces. I am certainly not the first scholar to find formal links between written and cinema tic texts or between scholarly and literary forms of writing. Literary scholars have long argued that many modernist avant - garde writers tested the bounds of literary representation by experimenting with cinematic techniques. 4 Film and F iction is an early example of work that provocatively linked Soviet Montage editing to the modernist literary experiments with stream of consciousness. Similarly, anthropologists have long recognized that anthropological and literary writing are what Cliff the introduction to her 2013 edited collection Novel Approaches to Anthropology , for instance, Marilyn Cohen cannot be investi 3 - specific term that describes a method of the two terms, at least in their historic al origins, are inextricably related. 4 Cinema and the Origins of Literary Modernism . 18 novels can be read as ethnographies, or interpretations of culture. Like these interdisciplinary studies, I draw connections between the formal operations of written and image texts in this dissertation. It is not my intention to make general c laims about - iterate the same ideas. Rather than argue that all travel writing is inherently cinematic or that all ethnographic documentary draws from the literary conventions of the travelogue, I work closely within the triad of textual examples in each chapter to tease out the formal protocols they share. In other words, I apply literary theory to image texts and film theory to written texts to open up new avenues of inquiry and to think differently about ethnographic looking practices and how they work. Reading comparatively, I put written and film texts into close conversation with one another and generatively explore their confluence around point of view. This dissertation is structured in three parts that each examine a cluster of texts that coalesce around representing so - Argonauts of the Western Pacific as sta rtlingly cinematic to reveal the shared point of view of modern anthropology and narrative cinema. Similarly, I Moana positions spectators as participant - observers by carefully soliciting their attention a nd prompting them to discover and then Mornings in Mexico , I trace the cinematic and anthropological effects of literary descriptive writing. Reading between these th ree texts, I argue that the looking protocols specific to the ethnographic gaze converge in this moment. 19 In the second chapter, I juxtapose three texts produced out of the Marshall family the ethnographic gaze diverges The !Kung of Nyae Nyae The Hunters (1957), and Elizabeth The Harmless Peo ple (1958) all draw on the same archive of field - members of the family were able to construct distinct kinds of texts out of a shared archive and experience makes this case study a particularly rich illustration of what comes to distinguish an anthropological point of view from a literary or cinematic one. In the thi rd chapter, I examine three texts immersed in a very different problem: how to 1981 ethnography Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman to be a provocative exa mple of the limitations of postmodern polyvocal to incorporate the transcribed speech of a e purposes of the study reveals less about Nisa than it does about Shostak and her struggle for interpretive authority over culture. Trinh T. Minh - Reassemblage brings the struggle to wrestle meaning from the sights and sounds of culture to the fore . As a self - identified Trinh occupies a distinctly different point of view in critique of the gaze of the tourist in her 1988 anti - travelogue A Small Place . Implicating her reader in the violent colonial history of her homeland Antigua, Kincaid forces an engagement 20 confronting, chastising, and teaching her readers. --- describe in this dissertation is a powerful one. Ethnographic looking may not h ave gone away, but both the subject who looks and the people who are the bearers of that look have changed dramatically. Indigenous people are now active producers and consumers of ethnographic texts, whether they are anthropological, documentary, or liter ary (Ginsburg 39 - 57) . Most twenty - first - at least to some extent, of the racist paternalism inscribed in that gaze. The very language that we use to describe the s ubject produced by ethnographic looking has undergone a transformation. In become incoherent. As James Clifford suggests, the operating premise of early anthropolog y in dwelling - in - Routes 2 - 3). 5 The nineteenth - century notion that def ined non - white - not only anachronistic but also logically impossible when we consider the unprecedented gh digital networks. Can there really 5 - century In an Antique Land . A pre - colonial world in which Indian and nineteenth - century writers, are worldly, highly - mobile, and cosmopolitan travelers. 21 6 along with their cognate terms How, then, do we account for and make sense of the strange persistence of the ethnographic gaze well into the twenty - first century? Even further, how can scholars of literature and visual culture find new ways to talk about ethnographic looking that can re - animate the stakes of that visuality in meaningful ways, both within our field and within the classroom? At a time in which the ideological analysis of ethnographic looking can be repetitive, or even worse, seems to have lost some of its political urgency, it is crucial to gene rate new strategies for analyzing what it means to engage in those looking practices. The analysis of visual culture is - held devices and compu ters. In fact, it would seem that the stakes of critically investigating point of view and the artifice of the gaze have never been higher. I suggest throughout this dissertation that comparative formal analysis offers one solution to this problem by openi ng up fresh possibilities for critique. 6 learners born in a digital age and his contention that they learn differently from p revious generations who are imm - 3). 22 CHAPTER 1: CONVERGENCE: CINEMATIC, ANTHROPOLOGICAL, AND LITERARY VISIONS Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski concludes the first chapter of his canonical ethnography The Sexual Lives of Sav ages - eye view of a native village, and are trying to form a compound moving picture of the life of the - distanced observation that the anthropologist crafts for his readers in this moment should not be surprising as it is chara cteristic of the ethnographic startling shift away from the discour se of anthropology and into the discourse of cinema. the photographic, his definition also refers to both the technical and conceptual qualities of the structure of the image on film is precisely the mechanism which produces the illus ion of animation that distinguishes the cinematic object from the photographic still. In this passage, Malinowski makes explicit a thread that runs through all his ethnography by linking the emergent gaze of participant - observation to cinematic seeing, a d istinctly twentieth - century - century object of study. Connecting the participant - observer to the cinematic spectator at this moment of synthesis in the text opens up questions ce 23 can spectators understand what they are seeing for the very first time? What kind of vision can render comprehensible the unfamiliar? What modes of observation can allow the observer to Argonauts 25)? While Malinowski may have considered his text a scientific contribution to the study of - first century readers his ethnographic writing appears to be an elaborate articulation of a specifically visual problem shared by early filmmakers: how to see the way the Other sees. Malinowski offered participant - observation, an ordered system of visual rules he codified in Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922 ), as a solution to this dilemma. By participant - observer strives to inhabit a privileged point of view both inside and outside of culture. As a mode of seeing, participant - observation offered the promise of a more complete picture of culture by suturing together fragments of observational data. The emergent cinematic language of continuity editing offered a similar solution to the visual dilemma that Malinowski identifies. Through a systematic ordering of film shots, continuity principles sought to construct a perceptual framework to give film audiences access to the subjectivity of the bodies onscreen. The advent of the eyeline match, in particular, radically t ransformed the spatial, temporal, and psychological experience of cinema by opening up multiple ways of seeing the event onscreen. For the first time, audiences could inhabit an impossible point of view, simultaneously inside and outside the world of the f ilm. It is widely accepted by film scholars that point of view is a concept central to film studies and questions about who is observing and how have become increasingly crucial to ever, are the suggestive links between point of view in its cinematic and anthropological manifestations. Filmmakers and 24 similarities extend beyond their subj ect matter. Crucially, both film and anthropology emerged in in the early years of the twentieth century as visual languages for interpreting culture from the inside. Malinowski may have coined - observer , but he was not the only trav eler who pursued observational projects that would now be considered ethnographic. By the time the anthropologist was writing his canonical first monograph, British and American travelers in many guises were becoming participant - lture. As Carey J. Snyder has noted, modernist British literature was heavily inflected by ethnological discourse, a 7 Inspired by anthropological writing, like The Golden Bough (1890 - 1915) The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), as well as nineteenth - century travelogues by writers like Mary Kingsley and Richard and lived among people they c about culture (6 - h accompanied the nomadic Bakhtiari people as they relocated from the harsh Turkish plains to the grasslands of pastoral Iran to make their 1925 documentary film Grass . Marti n and Osa Johnson lived among various tribes in Kenya to capture the images of people they considered animalistic Simba: King of the Beasts . Certainly the politics of these - the writing and films that they produced have 7 [and] off - center amo Predicament 3). 25 distinctive purposes, audiences and modes of address. What they share is an investment in In what follows, I trace the visual protocols that inform three early iterations of participant - observation: , documentary film Moana (1926) an collection of ethnographic travel essays Mornings in Mexico (1927). R eading comparatively across form and media , I seek to tease out the shared formal conventions at work in the visuality of early twentieth - century ethnography, literary t ravel writing and film. Considering the visual influences of literary and cinematic texts opens up the possibility of refram ing his ethnographic writing as one articulation of a visual polemic, rather than as a m asterwork of singular genius s travel writing anthropologically and cinematically suggests the ways that his narrative experiments with point of view were not simply reflections of his own idiosyncratic preoccupations , but shou ld be understood instead as pa rt of a larger through most of his fiction Malinowski, Flaherty, and Lawrence are all polemical figures, regarded as the perverse forefathers of t heir respective disciplines. Taken together, thei r canonical texts exemplify a problematic gaze, whether that gaze is figured as Western, Orientalist, patriarchal, imperial or colonialist. As white men, their privilege and imbrication in modern British and U.S. imperialist projects created the very possibility for a geographically mobile observing eye. The inherently troubling to scholars. The joke sequence at Nanook 26 of the North , for instance, in which the great hunter clownishly bites down on a record thus define civili zation and the illiteracy with modern objects that defines not - yet - civilized subjects for its punch line to make sense. 8 sing access to repressed Like so many of their predecessors, these white , male travelers grafted their fascination wi th base considered savage and animalistic, a representational practice that came with dire consequences for indigenous people. The Oth an object of study that had only recently become coherent. As Michael Elliot suggests in his study of American literary realism, the concept of culture that infor med the wide range of out of the anthropology of figures like E.B. Tylor and Franz Boas, ethnologists who actively the evolutionary, universalizing and aspirational attempt to establish the relativism that distinguished a twentieth - century notion of group - based difference fro m the teleological narratives of human progress that drove nineteenth - century ethnology. 8 - 27 regarded bounded objects of study and eans to uncover human experience in its most essential and profound forms, deploying specifically ethnographic practices of observation to launch their investigations of difference. Tracing the visual protocols that Malinowski, Flaherty, and Lawrence depl oyed in their Read together, their texts trace the history of a powerful twentieth - century visual project s, a 28 NEW VISIONS OF THE REAL of investigation that seemed to offer the promise of what Malinowski rather infamously liked to - century spectators, the experience of watching reality re - played on film offered a startl ingly new point of view. The advent of cinematic seeing, with its rapid succession of fragmentary projected images, was largely about harnessing the ability to infinitely duplicate the vis ual experience of everyday life (Littau 43 - 44). The potential of rec slow motion, or framed in close - that continued to surprise and delight audiences with its novelty into the 1920s. 9 The real world recor ded in one time and projected in another allowed viewers the critical distance of the historical observer, while at the same time offering an experience of immersion in another time and space believable enough that the first cinematic spectators confused t he image on film with the real thing, if only for a few moments. 10 As Walter Benjamin suggested, what made cinematic perception so unique was its ability to close the spatial and temporal gap between the observer and the event on film, making it possible f or spectators to simultaneously witness and our lives [and] on the other hand manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of 9 Jennifer Lynn Peterson writes that for the first twenty years of film history, non - fiction films made up the bulk of commercial cinema and that once feature films became more popular, actualities and travelogues persisted - Fictio American . Eds. Charlie Keil and Shelley Stamp. Berkeley: U of California P, 2004. 191 - 213. Print. 10 The origin myth of cinematic spectatorship hinges on the moment where spectators su pposedly shouted and famous 1895 short film Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat . Whether this story about the birth of cinematic vision is true or n ot, it dramatizes the physicality of the spectatorial experience in the earliest moments of film and asks us to recognize the advent of cinem atic seeing as a transformative sensorial experience at the turn of the twentieth century. 29 aches of ordinary human vision (236). This reflection, at the crux of meditation on the psychology of cinematic point of view. Cinematic technology at the turn of the twentieth century had already taken the shocking experience of everyday industrial modernity as its primary subject. The images in early films satisfied a public fascination with the prosaic activities of everyday life in both urban centers and in places i magined at the periphery of the modern, ind ustrialized world. The film programs in typically featured a mixture of short actualities covering a wide range of subjects, from views of crowded city stree ts bustling with 65). The lure of the exotic provided source material for both early non - fiction and fiction films, an arrangement that has indelibly linked the gaze of early cinema to the nascent projects of modern anthropology in film history. In fact, cinematic technology emerged as the product of a century - long scientific investment in capturing and preserving the minutiae of a rapidly modernizing world on film, a canonical examples of early cinema catalogue a pervasive interest in recording the otherwise fleeting images of a real world in perpetual motion, from the fast - paced experience of travel vis - à - vis the locomotive and horseless carriage to the complex physicality of bodies on the move. Wolof 30 Woman Walking often regarded as predecessors of modern ethnographic documentary, the subject matter of early films in general can be considered at the in tersection of what are now framed as distinct, and often competing, discourses: the disinterested, observational practices of science and the subjective, wholly personal representational practices of art. Filmmakers at the turn of the century , however, did not make such distinctions. sensationalize prosaic experience and to re - enc hant the observational gaze. As emerging modes of visuality, both anthropology and cinema in the early years of the twentieth century presumed that essential, undisc overed truths a bout humanity l ay beyond the reach of ordinary vision, and that those truths could be accessed through a systematic reordering of visual perception. As emerging modes of visual represen tation, cinematic and anthropological seeing had a profound influence on literary writing in the early twentieth century. The narrative experimentation of the modernist avant - garde was heavily influenced by the visual possibilitie s offered by the cinematic gaze. As Michael North argues, American writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemmingway, W.E.B. Du Bois, and James Wheldon conventionally - conceived reader (110). 11 The twentieth - century preoccupation with seeing reality anew united artists and scholars working across media forms. Their struggle to invent a visual language with the capacity to 11 Although North conside U.S.A to borrow explicitly from cinematic - 112, 142). 31 represent culture holistically led them to combine the multiple modes of observation available to them, including literary description, photography, the cinematic long - take and the emerging protocols of contin uity editing. The visual logic of the participant - observer that emerged from this experimentation combined the subjective, dialogic perspective of the cultural insider with - eye . This attempt at totalizing vision came to define the production of so - relationship to the Western, white travelers configured as global subjects. 32 BRONISLAW For several gen understood either as a historical record of cultural encounter or as a reflection of colonial ity 12 Scholarly work on the anth ropologist has made it impossible to ignore the ways that his ethnographic writing is a performance of authority implicated in the violence of colonialism. Marianna Torgovnick, for instance, convincingly reads the visual erotics at play in The Sexual Lives of Savages - 7). Fatimah Tobing - wide - rangi bound up in a racist paradigm that positions racially - marked bodies as primitive versions of humanity (8). Since the 1967 publication of his fieldwork diaries in which the an thropologist described his intense feelings of both repulsion and attraction to the bodies of his subjects, Malinowski and the brand of ethnographic observation that he invented have been subject to a painstaking process of deconstructive analysis by a new generation of anthropologists seeking to Ar gonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) and 12 fieldwork diaries revealed that the anthropologist was deeply troubled by the subjects of his study. He writes that Heart of Darkness 33 The Sexual Lives of Savages (1929) reached a wide audience after their publication, appealing not only to professional anthropologists and scholars, but to a general readership interested in primitive cultures. Bot h of these ethnographies attempt to describe the culture of indigenous people living in the Trobriand Islands, a small isla nd chain off the coast of Papua New Guinea, a country that became a frequent site for anthropological study in the twentieth century. Despite the cringe - ethnography at the time it was published in scholarly circles and beyond makes it worth posing questions about the formal operations at work in his writin g. What qualities made his ethnography so compelling? How did a relatively unknown scholar manage to write books that shaped a discipline and appealed to both scholarly and general readers for several generations? One characteristic that distinguishes Ma his contemporaries is his strategic use of narrative to draw readers into a diegetic world that is opening p ages of Argonauts reads more like a travelogue or adventure tale than fact - based tropical beach close to a native village, while the launch or dinghy which has brou ght you sails major ethnographic study to establish the scientific credibility and authority of his project, but style, the writer explicitly borrows from the conventions of literary travel writing to pique his al l, a staple of the adventure tale, a plot device made famous by canonical examples of the genre Robinson Crusoe , and Robert Louis 34 Treasure Island island places them within a familiar fictional context, but it also works to link the unfamiliar role The introduction to Argonauts serves a dual pur pose. Malinowski asserts his scientific culture in another authorial voice: that of the storyteller or auteur. Before setting down anything like a series of dictu ms for carrying out effective fieldwork, he narrativizes his own experiences upon his arrival in the Trobriand Islands, describing a cause and effect chain of events that appear naturally to lead him to invent participant - observation. Readers learn that Ma linowski ( who either ignore him entirely ) ither understands, nor is very much concerned with the manner in i allows him to establish necessary relationships with the islanders he is there to observe. In just a few pages, Malinowski manages to construct in miniature the narrative that 35 fact, it is difficult to extricate these individual narrative threads from one another, since Malinowski invites his reader to regard the text as a faithful reconstruction of what he actually witnessed in t savages. His personal story invites readers to understand participant - observat ion as simply a very human response to exceptional circumstances, rather than a self - conscious intervention in a rapidly shifting academic discipline. throughout Argonauts and as a cast of individuals singled out by name or status; the miss ionaries, traders, government officials, and other white men who Malinowski blames for everything from upheaval and unnecessary conflict to fabricating sensational stories about native customs; and finally the ethnographer himself, a character who is imbue George Stocking suggests, although Malinowski explicitly compares the Trobriand Islanders to Homeric heroes in t culture. 36 device by which he made prescription makes it clear that he was not just tinkering with narrative elements, but was deeply invested in cultivating a literary voice (109). This should not be surprising, given that the anthropologist professed a profound interest in novels. In both his introduction to Argonauts and his fieldwork diaries, he confesses his compulsion to read novels as an escape from the discomforts of tr avel, that he found both repulsive and alienating ( A Diary 55). Malinowski writes in his diaries about his fascination with the works of Alexander Dumas and Rudyard Kipling, but his most persistent literary inspiration seemed to be the modernist fiction of Joseph Conrad. In fact, Malinowski self - consciously set out t - brow, modernist literary writing, but e xplicitly links ethnographic writing to the artifice of literary narrative (Stocking 104). When read together, Argonauts Heart of Darkness and the complex psychological ambi valence that the novel charts. 13 writing beyond literary description and into a specifically cinematic register. If the 13 In his book Predicament of Culture , anthropologist James Clifford also reads comparatively between a writing (98). 37 chapter, for instance, readers are asked to imagine that they are suspended in space, taking an - of the native village, an impossible and distinctly cinematic point of view. Malinowski proceeds to fine - lace, the topographical details as they od - activities, Malinowski gives re What begins as an exercise in careful yet casual observation then shifts dramatically: Suddenly, our attention is drawn to some singular event, to a death, a tribal squabble, a division of inherited wealth, or to some ceremony. We watch it with understanding eyes, an d see, side by side, the workings of tribal law and custom, and the play of personal passion and interest. (49) appears in a succinct taxonomy of acts considered wo rthy of anthropological investigation: the conflict, the socially - proscribed methods of allocating wealth, and the ambiguous, catch - all 38 culturally - proscribed behavior associated with ritual, this list suggests that the messy, becomes the larger patterns of cultural behavior on the small scale that allows the ethnographic observer from the detached interest of an observing eye scanning the scene to a sharply focused attention mode of seeing informed by another emergent visual language, the principles of continuity editing gaining currency thr ough the films of American director D.W. Griffith (the most famous of which incidentally was released in 1915, the same year Malinowski a rrived in the Trobriand Islands). 14 Continuity editing conventions are designed to create easy - to - follow, spatially and temporally - coherent narratives that eliminate extraneous, unnecessary, or confusing visual information. Films edited using continuity pri nciples typically open with a shot taken from a distance from the action that establishes place and time before strategically visual narrative information ab out setting, characters, or objects with each successive, more tightly - framed shot. described as an level. When our attention is drawn to an event, the gaze of the reader shifts from the distance 14 American filmmaker D.W. Griffith refined t he continuity editing principles he had developed in A Girl and Her Trust (1912) in his two most famous films, The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). 39 - proximity, one where readers can notice the scene culminates by immersing readers in the rich visual and aural landscape of the native dance, an archetypal ethnographic ceremony, as Malinowski transitions to the third visual device shared by literary fiction and narrative cinema. The visuality of this moment works ographic narrative as Stocking suggests, but it also closely replicates the protocols of an emergent cinematic visual language contemporaneous with his study. If it seems strange to consider ethnographic writing cinematic, one only has to turn to the the oretical work of filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein, who considered the visuality of cinematic language (366). Eisenstein carefully traces the shifts in tim e and place in a passage from Oliver Twist that cinematic montage is an art for m with close formal links to the nineteenth century novel. connections he cinematic narrative language, however, compellingly illustrate close links between modes of writing typically considered to be discrete, even antagonistic, visual forms. If cine matic vision 40 borrows from literary visual devices as Eisenstein claims, I suggest reversing this formulation. In this mome nt , as in many others across his ethnographic work, Malinowski shifts the these two ways of seeing creates the unique interpretive position of the participant - observer, a point of e ethnographer to inhabit a liminal point of view somewhere in between the two. The participant - observer that Malinowski imagines the trained scientist who can not only witness events but interpret them in a larger, theoretically - informed, scholarly context. For him, participant - observation is a method for safe ly entering a entail giving up the disinterested objectivity that makes total cultural comprehension possible. Participant - observation is not only a visual meth as anthropologists put it; it is also a highly visual mode translating that research into writing. As in most academic fields, it is not enough for eth nographers to conduct research. Their research must be written a nd circulated among other ethnographers. Just as they are trained to see within the highly artificial paradigm of participant - observation, ethnographers are trained to produce writing that comes with its own visual protocols. Most ethnographic monographs i nclude photographs 41 carefully - staged photographs of important artifacts, and action snapshots of ritual events or candid moments that attest to the fact that the ethnograp ethos that validates the truth claims of the ethnographic text. Ethnographic writing also relies on graphs and charts to translate observed patterns of behavior into another visual system of representation, one that attempts to clarify and condense complex information into the one, singular image. Perhaps less widely recognized are the ways that the distinctive voice of ethnographic writing is inscribed by a visuality inherited not only from the descriptive practic es of the travelogue and the literary devices of fiction , but from the visual language of cinema. While visual anthropologists have made clear the links between realist documentary film and ethnographic projects, the connection between ethnographic writing and narrative cinema have been studiously ignored by anthropology, most likely because to recognize those links has the within the academy still relies. Eth nography since post - structuralism is certainly a highly self - conscious, reflexive practice; to their credit, anthropologists have undertaken the painstaking work of critically examining the colonial inheritance of their discipline, insistently u npacking it s most basic tenets and de - naturalizing the ethnographic monograph as a form of writing. To suggest that ethnographic writing in its earliest incarnations worked through a logic of cinema to immerse its readers should push us not only to reconsider how ant hropology makes truth claims, but to re - examine the ways that ethnographic projects were one experiment in vision among many other similar projects that tried to re - century. Like the documentary filmm aker or the travel writer, the participant - observer sought a 42 43 D. H. throughout his literary repertoire, linking his preoccupation with the primal energies and desires ( Mornings 35) the product of his own psyche as it was inherited from any supposedly disinterested science. As many of the other thematic categories that circulate throughout his writing, like phallic power and female sexuality, is one he shared with many modernists (159). She convincingly argues that his ability to substitute his version o operational in his work reveals how the concept becomes as a repository for unexpressed Western fantasies and desires. c interest in observing culture, but his travel writing, especially his 1927 essay collection Mornings in Mexico , seems to exemplify looking - living in Oaxaca, Mexico, and Taos, New Mexico, the essays c ontained in this collection are lyrical, anecdotal, and contemplative, but they are also richly descriptive, filled with prose images of an otherworldly landscape and the people who live there. That Lawrence turns his observational eye to the bodies and be haviors of Mexicans, Mexican Indians, and Native essays in particular as ethnographic. While he is certainly just as preoccupied with cataloguing a wide variety o Sea and Sardinia (1921), it is when 44 ditations on the Argonauts of the South Pacific project strongly resembles that of a participant - observer entering the field to live among the subjects of his study. Despite his efforts to differentiate himself explicitly from the - did in fact deploy similar humanity in the face of the alienating experience of industrialized modernity (100 - 101). Consider the pract ices of looking that this descriptive passage, characteristic of Down the creek, two native boys, little herdsmen, are bathing, stooping with knees together and throwing water over themselves, rising, gleaming dar k coffee - red in the sun, wetly. They are very dark, and their wet heads are so black, they seem to give off a bluish light, like dark electricity . (34 - 35) As a twenty - first - century reader, it is hard to imagine a passage that would better exemplify the vo - overtly sexualizes and infantilizes the subjects of his gaze, transforming the everyday ritual of bathing into a richly aestheticized and erotic visual experience. Framing an intimate moment as to view unapologetically, without the shame of being seen taking pleasure in such blatantly voyeuristic looking. 45 symptomatic, simply refracting a historical context of conquest, industrialization, and imperialism, no matter how gratifying the scholarly yield of such reading practices can be. It is ethnographic looking relatio ns, but to ask slightly different questions about how exactly an ethnographic lens works in a literary context. Lawrence was not trained as an anthropologist, nor al midlands, and recording those experiences in writing. Lawrence certainly comes to very different ither Malinowski or Flaherty. incomprehensible chaos; where Flaherty found a primal will to survive, Lawrence finds an irrational drive toward death. The visuality of his writing , however, is strikingly similar to both In the passage above, Lawrence sets up - manipulating language to construct a visual experience The exceedingly slow quality of these two sentences, with their multiple clauses extending what is a fairly simple snapshot image into a lingering, drowsy incantation, pushes the reader to savor each progressive detail and to focus e 4 6 ur attention. It is the question of how they look while bathing that primarily interests Lawrence though, and it is the moment we reach perverse. This is a mo ment, Lawrence tells us, worth watching; these are the kinds of details we should notice and savor for their aesthetic value. time, as is the writer who finds himsel f caught in a kind of ethnographic reverie. Lawrence plays with duration in this passage to heighten the erotic tension of secretly viewing his subjects. The slow - motion effect of the layered clauses of the sentences here mimics the cinematic long take, a obliquely in space where we can observe the boys without being seen taking such gratuitous as unobtrusive, - give us another point of view. Of course what i s elided here is precisely the modern context in which this kind of euphoric spectatorship is located. Like many ethnographies, particularly those written before e thnographic vision work by effacing the traces of modernity that appear at the edge of the frame routine of their daily work to bathe in the stream, hints, althou gh only obliquely, to the fact that tribal, nomadic, or even purely agrarian, but is instead subject to the same forces of modern 47 imperialism and globalization th at brought Lawrence to Mexico as a tourist in the first place. That tourism is part of the local economy is attested to across the essays: Lawrence writes about mozo complains about the local practice of overcharging white tourists for everything from oranges to huaraches; and he is deeply frustrated by the response of indigenous people to Western medicine, who he writes simple - f what he perceives as a child - like ignorance (62 - 63). When Lawrence does travel to an open air market, a site of explicit economic exchange, They are mostly small people, of the Zapotec race: small men with lifted chests and quick, lifted knees, advancing with heavy energy in the midst of the dust. And quiet, small, round - headed women running barefoot, tightening their blue rebozos round their shoulders, so often with a bab y in the fold. The white cotton clothes of the men so white that their faces are invisible places of darkness under their big hats. Clothed darkness, faces of night, quickly, silently, with inexhaustible energy advancing to the town. And many of the serran os, the Indians from the hills, wearing their conical black felt hats, seem capped with night, above the strait white shoulders. Some have come far, walking all yesterday in their little black hats and black - sheathed sandals. Tomorrow they will walk back. And their eyes will be just the same, black and bright and wild, in the dark faces. They have no goal, any more than the hawks in the air, and no course to run, any more than the clouds. (84) This passage begins by describing the physiognomy of what Lawren 48 he clearly regards as their fema le counterparts. Both of these sentences call attention to the It is not unt il we reach the third sentence in the passage, or the third layer in this written image, that Lawrence takes a turn toward his more modernist literary sensibility. Here he introduces an idea that begins to subsume this passage, an abstract notion of darkne ss, incoherence, and violence that runs throughout his writing on Mexico. An aesthetic observation ble places of darkness under their bodies into shapes and colors that come to stand in for alternative meanings made clear in the sentence that follows. In this fo figures of darkness clothed in white cotton. As spectral, ominous forms, they simply stand in for nowhere to the somewhere that is town. That the purpose of their journey is to buy and sell goods, an enterprise that marks their humanity and the existence of an economy in which they actively participate, is replaced in this passage by a kind of purposelessness that for Lawrence frozen in pre - a well - worn path to town, one that has been made many times before and will always be made in the same purposeless, meaningless way. 49 - motion effect that gestures toward a cine matic register. The first two clauses repeat the otherworldly image of bodiless figures who look like - description . The third and fourth clauses shift from describing his rence does not stop here, however, but continues to refine his original image, suggesting the terror of ifth clause. First, individuals are rendered bodiless, then faceless, before the image takes on a more sinister quality. As a written image, the effect resembles that of a cinematic camera slowly tracking out to reveal how the fragment is part of a whole. In a sense, what Lawrence found in Northern Mexico and the U.S. Southwest was an imaginary Indian that already existed in his literary repertoire. The darkness that Lawrence n of an idea that he explores in various ways across his writing about both Mexicans and Native Americans at ed while living in North America, The Plumed Serpent mantra of the text. What he perceives as the blank stare of Mexican men signals a predisposition to violence: And to this day, most of the Mexican Indian women seem to bring forth stone knives. Look at them, these sons of incomprehensible mothers, with their black eyes like flints, 50 rip you up. (57) Even when describing th e only local person with whom Lawrence forged a relationship, his mozo Rosalino, the writer returns to his fascination with black eyes. Rosalino is different, for finds the particularity of his gaze compelling and writes about it at le perverse and contradictory logic, the - I n his more well - known travelogue, Sea and Sardinia , Lawrence makes strikingly similar Sardinia, an island whose ancient history captures his imagination ( Sea 67 ). Making a distinction of this Italian type to a much earlier, i - 51 architecture and Neolithic ruins that reveal its ancient past, but the eyes of the peasant people, subjects w ho Lawrence positions as unchanged by time, that give the writer access to a primitive, of Italian peasants in the paintings of Velasquez and Goya, he self - con sciously marks his descriptive writing as part of an aesthetic tradition in which peasants function as picaresque before he visited the country, produced through the histories of representation he alludes to. For like nowhere, desires contact with to acquire new, m first essay in Mornings in Mexico , Lawrence introduces an idea that he pursues throughout the collection. He begins at the scene of writing itself, where he sits in the little adobe courtyard of the rented house in Oaxaca. Setting the stage for the essays that follow, the writer introduces the sweeps the patio, whistling; and finally the 52 - more - Mornings 11). Positioned in the text between a lap dog and tw o tame parrots, Rosalino is immediately framed as animalistic, a being whose subjective humanity can never be fully realized and whose interiority the writer can only speculate about. Once all the narrative elements are in play, Lawrence begins to muse a bout their potential under the surface of all his writing: the o rigins of humanity (13). Expressing dissatisfaction with chaos a What appeals to him about an Aztec narrative of origins is the way it conceives of history as a history is always co - existent with the current moment. acknowledge the uncanny sound of the parrots. Strangely, in a moment that seems to offer the possibility of forg ing a relationship over a shared joke, Lawrence suddenly becomes aware of his and he wants to bridge it with the foot - rule of the three - dimensional space. He - 23). In the event Lawrence imagines, man but remains separate from the writer, 53 Lawrence suggests in this m (381). His essay turns on the notion, however, that this consciousness is never wholly available for observation but is always obscured. In a historical moment when the newly codified pr actice of ethnography insists on the looking, here Lawrence asserts an opposite claim: that when he meets the gaze of the Other, what he sees is only a refle but never fully access what seems to be under the surface. It is in the context of writing about the Native Americans of the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico, a site Lawrence often visited t o watch the native dances performed on for tourists on public feast days, that he most fully articulates his The consciousness of one branch of humanity is the annihilation of the consciousness of another branch. That is, the life of the Indian, his stream of conscious being, is just death to the white man. And we can understand the consciousness of the Indian only in terms of the death of our consciousness. (102) While the desire f writing, the violence with which he imagines the collision of absolute difference in this passage is startling. The white man, a category in which the writer clearly places him self and his readers, 54 insists that understandi annihilation he actively sought to imagine in his fiction. Significantly, it is watching the spectacle of the native dances at Taos that compels Lawrence to stake a claim about the impenetra native dance is, after all, one of the privileged sites of ethnography. Appearing repeatedly in patterne d behavior. In this moment, the act of observing the quintessential primitive ritual forces the writer away from the descriptive and toward the declarative, a mode in which he readily asserts abstract claims about radical difference. Perhaps to compensate for the problems with visuality that he describes here, Lawrence turns from describing native bodies and rituals to comprehend the reality of the Other. Thes at curious fantastic clothes, and able to kill a man by hissing at him; able to leap through the air in great about Mexicans and Indians with the authority of the expert and talking like his imaginary native. Declarative 55 th - 9). These imagined natives are defined largely through their inability to recognize or understand the technologies and economies regularly associated with industrialization, a way of What Lawrence seems to be after is a literary strategy of de - familiarizing the bodies and the moment in which he is ce himself spent a lifetime trying to escape. His strategic shifting between narrative voices and points of view can be read as a specifically literary iteration of the gaze of the participant - observer. Creating a narrative construct in which readers are f orced to oscillate between inhabiting radically different kinds of subjectivity works through a similar logic, one with visual implications. To think about conversely to think like In the end, writing in the imagined voice of the Other is a strategy that ends up simply naturalizing what travelogue writing and ethnographic fictions: ritual behavior and a primitive relationship to modern technology. Imagining and trying to inhabit a radically Othered point of view is an a ttempt, however, to use literary tools to ar ticulate kinds of relating that Lawrence claims are not 56 interpretive claims about culture do not, for Lawrence, reveal the phenomenon that literary writing, rather than anthropological narrative, is uniquely positioned to address. ng can now be read for the ways it seems to enact unding increasingly reflexive meditations on the self that writes and the understand . of what was once a naturalized practice of perception, calling into question his own methods as he becomes increasingly frustrated with the limits of the visual. While he may begin with a quest ng can accommodate his later available to his vision or to our ow n. What we can see is the writer himself, a traveler suspended 57 ROBERT Moana (1926) has traditiona lly been considered Moana , but it is Nanook of the North (1922) that is commonly considered the model par excelle nce of early documentary film form (Brownlow 471). Unlike Nanoo k, the South Sea romance narrative of Moana did not feature the dramatic fight to for human survival that had originally cap tivated audiences, but instead painted a picture of island life as a drowsy, playful sequence of repetitive tasks. 15 Despite the coming - of - age narrative that culminates in a carefully - staged climactic scene of ritual tattooing, most of the film captures wh preparing food, hunting, fishing, and making clothes, a focus which can certainly be described as survival tale that made his feature - Moana appealing to both audiences in 1926 and to film scholars in the current moment. One only has to consider that Moana is one of the few Flaherty films still awaiting restoration and recirculation by Criterion to see that the film never really found a modern audience beyond film historians interested in categorizing early documentary images. The lack of vigorous critical interest in the film seems strange, especially considering its privileged status in narrati ves about the historical 15 e second film based on the mistaken belief that they would find islanders battling gigantic sea creatures in the Pacific, but they quickly learned that tropical life was far more sedate than they imagined. While they may have intended to film scenes of epi c struggle with the natural world, what they ended up filming were the prosaic activities of the Samoan people with whom they lived and worked (Brownlow 481). 58 origins of Film Studies and Visual Anthropology, distinct disciplines that both claim it as an anthropological nor documentary in t he twenty - first century meanings of those terms, but is the activities from start to finish. Yet, as Richard Barsam suggests, Moana ce that are not of this the period (51). What interests me about Moana ways that this particular mode of visuality that has posed considerable difficulty in efforts to categorize the film as either ethnographic film or realist documentary. It is precisely this tension s Moana a crucial text for histories of twentieth - as singular projects, testaments to the genius of an iconoclastic auteur. Rather than trace the singularity of his aesthetic project, I earliest film projects to other similar practices of documenting lifeways perceived as 1920s. A brief glimpse at one of the more frequently mentioned scenes of the film in which limbs a tree to gather coconu ts illustrates hazy status somewhere in between ethnographic film and naturalist documentar y. As the young boy expertly 59 climbs the slim trunk of the p alm, the camera follows his upward movement in a dramatically long tilt that reveals, for the first time, the startling height of the tree and the danger that accompanies what initially seemed to b unfazed eventually leav ing the frame, but this time the camera does not follow him. Instead, - up tr ying to dislodge coconuts from the palm to drop on the beach where his brother waits to gather them. Viewers are promptly positioned alongside the small boy, swaying precariously at the top of the skinny palm, a feat which points both to the artifice of th 16 The scene ends by cross - cutting between two distinct him on from the ground, a juxtaposi simultaneously. takes and edited sequences troubles any easy distinction between ethnographic filmmaking , naturalist documentary , and fiction film in ways that have historically been disconcerting for film scholars and visual anthropologists alike. In this moment in particular, the filmmaker asks his audience to subscribe to t he mythology that Bill Nichols claims underwrites all documentary film: that we are seeing events exactly as they would have happened if the ubiquitous camera had not been there to record them (239). Flaherty asks us to believe that we are granted privileg ed access to a vision of real Samoan life, yet the montage of the final moments of the scene make this notion untenable, reminding us that the 16 man tree - ethnographic documentary unrecognized by anthropologists themselves testifies to the artifice of the genre and to le influence on the form. 60 editing eye. 17 Fl industrial modernity (albeit a state in which paradoxically, both filmmaker and sp ectator are complicit). If audiences of Nanook were thrilled by witnessing the dangers of Arctic life, Moana their everyday activities that aligns Moana with the ethnographic mode of observation that emerged in the 1920s in the U.S. and Brit ain. Like Malinowski and Lawrence, the filmmaker sought to immerse himself in the primitive cultures that were the subjects of his films and then re - create that experience for film audiences. Flaherty was certainly inventing new forms of cinema , but he was also inventing new forms of observing and recording culture that were closely tied to the visual protocols of an emergent anthropology. Re - reading Moana as a film inks participant - observer. Documentary filmmaking and ethnography are closely linked representational practices with shared histories and disciplinary principles . It is a now a commonplace in film studies that repre sentations of the real (Nichols, Representing Reality 5). L ike all films, documentaries do not simply capture th e real world in front of the camera lens, but organize that world through formal 17 While Robert Flaherty worked with Helen Van Dongen to edit his later films, both Nanook and Moana were edited collaboratively by him and his wife, Frances Flaherty. 61 choices in both pre - and post - production. Similarly, it is now widely recognized within anthropology that ethnography is a process of inscription rather than s traightforward t historically and institutionally determined texts and can never be read as accurate recordings of real encounters and events, but as interpretive and inventive text ual representations of culture that his phrase can also be read as a fitting description of the representational str ategies of ethnographic writing (Hardy 13). Both documentary filmmaking and ethnography are practices historically linked to the increased mobility and rapid technological innovation of late ninete enth century industrial documenting the very systems of mass transportation and industry that made their film projects 98 Torres - Straight Expedition made photographic technology central to their ethnographic fieldwork, a practice that became standard for all ethnographic expeditions and quickly expanded to include cinematic cameras. Although the impulse to capture the worl d - in - motion on film is characteristic of the nineteenth - century fascination with optics, the invention and availability of cinematic cameras, celluloid film, and projection devices certainly propelled the rapid development of a host of documentary projects in the twentieth century. D ocumentary filmmaking and anthropology also share a troubling history of complicity with various colonial political projects that made it thinkable to film in locations once considered remote or inaccessible, quite literally op ening up multiple fields of research, and funding 62 expeditions to gather information about future imperial subjects. 18 were subsidized by trading companies with substantial investment in imperial projects is often cited by scholar s as evidence of his imbrication in colonial interests and power relations, calling into question the ethics of his relationship to his indigenous subjects along with any veracity to his work. 19 The thrust of this criticism supposes that if the filmmaker really set out to modernity, his own complicity in those forces would seem to make the very bases of that project untenable. A similar problem has haunted a nthropological fieldwork its inception. Early in the threat of erasure by the demands of imperialist expansion. Claude Lévi - Strauss would make spectacle As a product of imperialism, nascent anthropology saw itself caught in a disciplinary double - 18 Historian of documentary Erik Barnouw notes that the major producers of early documentary films were actively sought to portray conquest overseas in a favorable light for audiences at home (22 - 26). 19 Flah - Frères, a French fur trading company, has been anti - realist, particularly the way he positions his indigenous subjects in relation to his imagined audience (8). 63 Despite t heir shared histories, documentary and ethnographic filmmaking are often considered distinct practices with distinct purposes, particularly by scholars of visual anthropology. Karl Heider, for instance, worries over what he perceives as a promiscuous use o f 20 For him, properly ethnographic record ethnographic data, and must be holistic, emphasizing cultural contex t over narratives focusing on individual characters (8). Similarly, Jay Ruby argues that only films intended for anthropological study should be considered ethnographic. Both anthropologists are highly filmed reality, advocating for the use of a relatively stationary camera to capture continuous action as it unfolds. surprising that scholars in the field have been q 21 ethnographic documentary, particularly his tendency to focus his films on individuals, reducing complex, large - scale social problems to relatively straightforward conflicts between man and 20 - makin g practices. In response to the common practice of hiring documentary filmmakers to accompany ethnographers in the field, Ruby urged anthropologists intain the properly termed ethnographic films. 21 Moana , Heider includes the film in his f ield - defining survey of ethnographic film Films for Anthropological Teaching (1976). To include Flaherty in his history of ethnographic film, he positions the filmmaker as an early forefather of the genre, making the case that Flaherty made films about cu ltures that have historically been the subject of anthropological study and in sites where canonical fieldwork was conducted: Nanook 1883 study of the Inuit, and Moana was shot just is a way of writing a history of visual anthropology that legitimizes his contribu tion to ethnographic filmmaking, Nanook of the North and Moana. 64 incorporate the his work into histories of ethnographic film practice, a rule so often followed that to fail to mention Flaherty in such historical surveys becomes a meaningful omission. 22 More examples of ethnographic observation, but for seemingly opposite r easons. Allison Griffiths, for of an emergent anthropological perspective (46). Tobing Rony considers Nanook a prime - depth reading of the film in the films to a nthropological ways of imagining race in the early twentieth century (14). Both y , they both view his romantic vision of the primitive as a characteristic that aligns his project with the impulses of early ethnography, a rhetorical move that positions Flaherty firmly within an anthropological historical narrative. Flaherty is a uniq ue figure in histories of twentieth - century visual culture, both because his distinct style of filmmaking lies at the intersection of multiple disciplinary knowledges and because his work continues to appeal to scholars and filmmakers alike (and often for the same the process of making films is routinely praised by anthropologists like Heider, who compares raphic technique of personal 22 In he r introductory text for students of Visual Anthropology, Fadwa El - Guindi only mentions Flaherty in passing, noting that his wo rk, associated with d anthropology. This choice is significant because she carefully limits the scope of French ethnographer and filmmaker to whom she dedicates he r entire book (37 - 43). 65 Rouch 32). In a 1974 essay, Rouch famously claimed Flaherty as one of hi s primary influences, attributing his own concepts that when he first screened his footage for Allakariallak, the man cast as the Inuit hunter Nanook, Flaherty ad no idea that he was inventing, at that very instant, participant - observati on 23 - observation is the collaboration between subject and filmmaker. In the moment that he describes, Allaka riallak recognizes himself represented on film as Nanook, the title character of an epic ethnographic fiction, and of this moment willfully ignores the proble - reading of Nanook has been mytho logized: as a savant anthropologist who turned to Allakariallak for answers in his investigation of the human will to survive. local people when making his films is c ertainly a very early example of contemporary ethnographic documentary practices, but it is not only his production methods that make his the contemporaries, Flaher Moana , aligns the visuality of his films with a specifically twentieth - century ethnographic sensibility. 24 Although Moana does feature a climactic finale that is the stuff of Hollywood fantasy, complete 23 Significantly, Rouch names Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov as his other primary influence in this essay. 24 Tabu : A Story of the South Seas King Kong (1933) feature 66 with a staged ritual dance, the majority of the film is composed of rather lengthy scenes that of imminent danger that haunts the hunting scenes in Nano ok or Man of Aran (1934), collecting food appears in Moana as a series of pleasant and mundane tasks. Bare - easily gather the abundant seaweed and shellfish out of the water, pulling oversized clams out of the shallows and displaying them playfully for the camera. A group of islanders swim out to meet a sea turtle as it swims close to shore and keep him underwater until he is lifeless, an act of killing that appears more playful than gruesome or difficult. Scenes like these do not adva nce any clear overarching narrative but rather depict island life as a series of anecdotal stories, the shore - tale evidence uence of events that will unfold, but instead seems to pose a series of questions: What does an empty cocoanut shell been committed and who is the likely cu lprit? Flaherty begins the scene by posing an ambiguous conflict scenario, a problem that the rest of the scene works to resolve and clarify. what lives inside. First he tries prying the large rocks from their moorings, an impossible task for a young boy that leaves him breathless. He seems to pause, looking off in the distance, and then returns to the den, picks up the cocoanut shell once more to re - looks back and forth between the object in his hands and the deep crevice between the rocks 67 before tossing the shell to the ground. A quick cut interrupts the shot, indicating that frames have are at the den and bites his fingernails. Suddenly, he brushes the sand off his knees, looks off - screen, and quickly moves up and out of and a shorter one tha t he begins to strip with a knife. The image fades to black and when it fashioned into a point against the longer one that has been prepared for this purpose. The f ilm abruptly cuts to a close - up of the action, drawing our attention to the process of making fire through friction; in three cuts, Flaherty condenses that process so that audiences quickly witness - app ears in the frame, patiently blowing on the spark he has managed to produce. Taking up some fibrous material lying just off - screen, he manages to light the tinder and coax it into a mass of white smoke that he uses to force whatever has been eating the coc oanut out its rocky den. Reaching his arm deep inside the dark the camera. The final title card of the sequence identifies the culprit and clarifies the events we - Moments like this one contrast sharply with the logic that drives the coming - of - age narrative that frames Moana because they do not advance the story in meanin gful ways or give audiences information about the title character. In fact, the majority of the film is not directly information that would seem necessary to understand th the tattooing ritual that signifies his transition to manhood. What this scene does reveal is object 68 over event, the film process of ritual tattooing signify to the entire group. While not technicall y a long take, this scene requires spectators to watch a ra ther lengthy process of problem atching this scene comes from the ambiguity of the action as it unfolds onscreen. Rather than explain events, this sequence, like many others in the film, requires audiences to interact with the image onscreen, interrogating what we see and wrestling with potential meanings. This scene asks featured here because in th is moment in the film, audiences are prompted to examine an discovers an empty coconut shell and thinks his way to solving a problem onscreen, spectators are also required to attend to the problem posed by a series of ambiguous images and to solve the mystery of their final meanings. ethnographic register (17). 25 While many ethnographic documentaries produced in the second half of the twentieth century were made for an audience of school - age children and were 25 since the film is often read as an early version of ethnographic documentary. Like me, they contrast his pedagogical impulse with his storytelling impulse, a distinction that is certainly informed by a retrospective point of view, though at the time Flaherty made his films such distinctions were not codified. Ellis and McLane claim that Flaherty was both a storyteller and a teacher, whose curiosity infused all of his work. Their gloss of Flaherty is in the tradition of auteur criticism. 69 ilms offer a more subtle lesson. Moana does not attempt to explicitly explain Samoan culture to its audience, but rather tries to teach us how to see culture , like it is not to present information about Samoan history, values, or even the large - scale patterns of behavior that make culture legible, but instead to show us the ways that the camera can reveal what is authentically and deeply human about the subject on film. Editing the film in post - footage, revealing its deeper meanings (Calder - Marshall 97). While I have turned an analytical eye toward the two scenes that fea distinctly childlike point of view thus far in this chapter, I do not mean to suggest that these scenes are often mentioned in the critical litera ture on Flaherty in general and Moana in clearly inscribes the image with meaning. No matter how appealing these anecdotal moments can be to scholars, focusing cri tical attention on the same set of images tends to naturalize many of the seemingly more straightforward images in the film, moments where a stationary camera nu mber of such scenes in Moana footage ethnographic and classify the film as an early ancestor of ethnographic documentary or duration of problem solving still structured by a problem - resolution narrative of its own. The scene may delay the larger coming - of - age narrative, suspending the progression of that story through a kind of anecdotal 70 aside, but it remains fully inscribed within a cause and effect narrative chain, one that also Flaherty create d expressly for the film. Scenes that simply record tasks from start to finish, on the other hand, seem to function as digressive asides that disrupt the forward - moving logic of narrative film. A four - minute scene in which two women transform a strip of m ulberry bark into the traditional sarong - style wrap Samoans call the lava - lava is a case in point. Nestled between two scenes of food gathering, this sequence introduces viewers to yet another kind of household task, he scene opens with the simple, declarative title card, cohesion of the eighteen shots, Flaherty shows us the process of turning a single, flexible strip of mulberry bark into a soft, wearable garment. Strategically placed title cards clarify th e images onscreen, directing viewers to understand the image in each take as a single step in a larger process of material transformation. As Mother works on the fibrous strip, rubbing, scraping, and banging it flat, the fibers become more and more malleab le, softening and widening until the bark begins to reaches its maximum proportions another character is introduced to the scene, a young woman and then painting the fabric with intricate designs in a red dye they are shown making from 71 finely decorated garment both for Mother, who delicately touches the fa bric admiring her own This scene shifts focus away from the logic of narrative film, drawing upon conventions of the actualit y or travelogue film that revel in the spe ctacle of the recorded event itself. If a his mother and his lo ve interest. That sub tly implied narrative link recedes into the background here because the scene prioritizes the process of making, foregrounding the task rather than subordinating it to information about the relationship of the characters onscreen. In o ther words, how a traditional lavalava is made and to preserve an artisanal process on film, rather than to elicit questions about who is making it or why. As in each scene of the fi lm, our attention is highly directed in this sequence. We are encouraged to believe that we are witness to a single, continuous event in although what we know of Flaherty and his careful style of filmmaking suggests that this scene, like the others in his films, has been carefully staged for the camera and that what we perceive as a single, continuous process of transformation is quite probably crafted from nume rous strips of mulberry bark at different stages of preparation that have been used to demonstrate the entirety of a lengthy, time - consuming process in a condensed fashion onscreen. Based on what the film tells us about the wide variety of daily tasks in t ypical Samoan life, why would we assume that anyone would spend an entire day to make a garment from start to finish, particularly when the film shows us how the task requires at least seven stages? What we are watching is perhaps 72 much closer to demonstrat that unfolds seamlessly onscreen with the help of elliptical editing. Nevertheless, the series of tasks that we see demonstrated on camera appeals to the d fascination with an elaborate creative process that the fantasy - t acquires new value in the context of the streamlined systems of mass production favored by industrialized modernity at the turn of the twentieth century. The kind of artisanal practice that Flaherty privileges here contrasts sharply with the dehumanizing work of the assembly line, in of idyllic making and doing seem to be at the heart of the project undergirding Moana , the sites where he wants to locate the de visualize something as ephemeral and abstract as human customs, and rituals of indigenous people. The visual grammar of his documentaries may have announced themselves as a break from the storytelling conventions of classical Hollywood linked to the visual documentary practices of travelers in many guises, from the tourist, adve nturer, or explorer of the nineteenth century to the emergent ethnographers, journalists, and established and refined in his earliest films certainly resonate with what Malinowski was doing 73 in his early ethnographic writing, but his tendency to romanticize the bodies and behaviors of own subconscious desires and fantasies. 74 NATIVE IMAGININGS imaginary construct, a phrase that calls attention to the shifting, arbitrary meanings of the category and the many purposes it served for nineteenth and early twentieth - century Western thinkers and artists: as a subje fundamentally visual of an anonymous figure, scantily clothed and engaged in some barely comprehensible ritual practice because, as a conceptual category, the term is inextricable from both an archive of investment in participant - observation in this chapter, I have to tried to call attention to the space behind the fram e, so to speak, asking not only who is looking at so - called natives, but how they are looking, for what purpose, and to what effects. By the mid - practices firmly housed in the univer sity and differentiated among specific kinds of disciplinary knowledge and media forms. Suddenly it became possible to consider certain kinds of image - participant - obse rver, once a unique and innovative point of view, became codified and professionalized. If the gaze of participant - considered a product of imperialism, what political, social, and economic forces dispersed that gaze into discrete modes of 75 c, even eccentric, travelers to the serious work of professionals? In the next chapter I explore these questions, tracing the ways that by the middle of the twentieth century in Britain and the U.S., the gaze of the participant - observer was diffused among distinct media forms and disciplinary knowledges. There are still profound similarities among literary, cinematic, and anthropological texts in our current moment, particularly their shared investments in visuality and narrative. Formally, however, litera ry writing, documentary film, and anthropological writing are distinct representational practices that make meaning differently. Thinking through these differences and their visual implications offers up potential ways to de - familiarize the historical traj ectory of ethnographic visuality by imagining other configurations of looking. 76 CHAPTER 2: In the introduction to his 1986 collection of essays Writing Culture , James Clifford core of the discipline. Sapir and Benedict had, after all, to hide their poetry from the scientific - 4). In our current moment, i t is commonly accepted that the generic divisions that separate travel writing from anthropology or ethnographic documentaries from art films is arbitrary at best. As late a s 1986, however, Clifford could easily recall the notion of a pure ethnographic study, based on research carried out in the field and defined against the impressionistic writing of tourist travelogues, and could make what were considered radical claims abo ut the literary qualities of anthropological writing. For much of the twentieth century, the divisions between kinds of ethnographic representations were distinct and often regulated by institutional and disciplinary affiliation: anthropologists produced e thnography and documentary films while amateur travelers, journalists, or literary writers produced travelogues. The texts that I analyze in this chapter were produced in this climate and reflect the generic conventions that made the boundaries between eth nography, travelogues, and ethnographic documentaries legible. By the mid - twentieth century in the U.S. and Britain, the ethnographic visuality that - specific set of rep resentational practices and conventions. The lure of an imagined primitive that had captured the imagination of white, Western travelers in the nineteenth century continued to provide a wellspring of source material for many academic fields in U.S and Brit ish universities 77 rd and preserve what were - established visual craft texts that appealed to different audiences and reflected different goals. This discursive shift has shaped the way scholars think and write about representational gained traction are retrospecti vely labeled as iterations in what has become a long history of ethnographic visuality. As I discussed in the previous chapter, Robert Flaherty may not have promin ent figure in histories of film whose work was considered emblematic of documentary style. After the codification of ethnographic vision in the 1950 s however, most ethnographic texts tended to adhere to disciplinary conventions. 26 Anthropologist Paul Rabin ow wrote two books about Morocco, for instance, but one is an ethnography written for other anthropologists while the other is an anecdotal, impressionistic text written with a more general readership in mind. 27 To discuss them as simply different iteration s of the same ethnographic narrative is to ignore their distinct rhetorical contexts and formal conventions. This chapter traces how in Britain and the U.S. the practices for describing so - called nventions in the first part of the twentieth century to the distinct protocols associated with specific disciplines and discursive forms in the latter. While scholars regularly characterize the gaze of anthropological writing and 26 One notable exception is anthropologist Claude Lévi - Tristes Tropiques , a text that has become famous f or its unique blend of subjective reflection and anthropological truth claims. 27 Two years after publishing the ethnographic monograph Symbolic Domination: Cultural Fo rm and Historical Change in Mor occo (1975), Rabinow published Reflections on Fieldwork i n Morocco (1977), a highly personal travelogue describing experiences strategically excluded from his scientific study. 78 certain literary travelogu gaze are quite different. To achieve the neutral distance required of the scientific observer, anthropologists strategically tried to remove their own subjective voice from their writing and simply transcribe the data they had collected in the field into the academic conventions of an ethnographic study. The literary travelogue, on the other hand, did just the opposite. Indebted to mid - twentieth century travelogue writers were self - consciously foregrounding their uniquely subjective role as observers and interpreters of culture in their own texts. Documentary filmmakers used the supposed neutrality cinematic montage to subtly craft an interpretation of cultural behavior for spectators. Other than representational medium, of course, the issue of subjective point of view is what distinguishes anthr opological writing, literary travelogues, and ethnographic documentaries from one another. For mid - twentieth - century anthropologists, assuming the voice of the objective observer was part of establishing a scholarly ethos that gave the writer the authority to literary writers sought to distinguish their writerly voice from ethnographers and other travel writers by giving their own particular version of events. After all, the unique authorial voice of literary modernists like D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Rebecca West, or William Carlos Williams is what made their writing compelling to readers. Documentary filmmakers, on the other hand, wanted to assure audiences of the authentic ity of their footage while also offering Subsequently, e thnographic documentaries craft a point of view that is both pervasive and often concealed . 79 In what follows, I strat egically close read a literary travelogue, an ethnographic documentary, and a I argue that while literature, documentary film, and anthropology drew from a shared archive practices, I turn to a nexus of ethnographic texts produced between 1957 and 1976 by the Kalahari Desert of South Africa. 28 Working from a shared archive of field notes, diaries, photographs, film footage and memory, Elizabeth Marshall wrote a highl y - celebrated popular travelogue The Harmless People (1958), John Marshall made an award - winning documentary The Hunters (1957), and Lorna Marshall wrote a canonical ethnographic study The !Kung of Nyae Nyae (1976). The family went on to produce more books and films using this source What their visual and textual archive elucidates so vividly are the ways in which acts of into literary travel writing, documentary film and ethnography, forms of writing and image - making that had become distinct forms of knowledge production by the middle of the twentieth century. Each of thei r texts is an iteration of a shared ethnographic narrative that attempts to reconstruct the experience of cross - cultural 28 the term they use to describe themselves. John Marshall wrote that the people his family met and befriended in not to use either word here human and land rights. 80 encounter through a specific set of visual protocols. How each text accomplishes this, however, is quite different. I consider this par ticular triangulation of texts to be a productive case study of the shift from the diffuse, experimental ethnographic visuality that emerged in the early years of the t wentieth century to the codification of that visuality in the forms of ethnographic repr esentation that exist today. The results of their efforts are texts that exemplify the visual protocols that came to define literary narrative, documentary film, and anthropological writing in the twentieth and twenty - first centuries. 81 FROM CAMBRIDGE TO THE KALAHARI The story of the Marshall expeditions has been told and re - told by many people: dutiful disciples themselves. Elizabeth Marshall giv pages of her travelogue and reflects on that story in an afterward written in 1989; Lorna Marshall provides a more detailed account of the expeditions in the introduction of her first book about t he - tells the story in the forward to her second ethnographic study; and John raightforward account in A Kalahari Family (2001), a five - part series that painstakingly documents the 50 - year relationship Part tourist travelogue, part adventure tale, and part anth ropological study, the story that the family collectively tells is firmly embedded within the conventions of a long history of travel writing. According to Lorna Marshall, after retiring from a long and successful career as a civil engineer, her husband, L aurence, decided to spend more time with his family and planned a trip - gatherers was p i qued . After consulting with anthropologists who w ere friends of the family, the family decided to return to South - West Africa and actively seek contact with Following this first trip, Laurence and Lorna Marshall trav eled to the Kalahari multiple times with both of their children, Elizabeth, 20, and John, 18, to see something few people had hunting and gathering in the remote a nd inhospitable desert ( !Kung 8). The Marshalls were not 82 anthropologists, nor were they accompanied by a trained ethnographer on their first official, subsidized expedition in 1952. 29 chapter of her 1976 ethnographic study, the expeditions were originally conceived of as were not experts, they were curious, wealthy and well - connected to academic circles in their hometown of Cambridge, Massachusetts. 30 Although they could not entice a professional ethnographer to accompany them, their party typically included ten to fourteen people including some four or five African men who served as interpreters, a cook, and a mechanic, as well as scholars in archeology, linguistics, zoology, and botany from universities in South Africa, Britain, or the U.S. ( Harmless 6; Filming 26). For several months in 1951, travelling in a convoy of four trucks a nd a jeep carrying food, large drums of water, gasoline, and other supplies, the group traversed unmapped regions of the desert searching for Bushmen groups to film and study. The expedition was able to locate dependable waterholes in the region at a site called Gautscha, a place that became central in the narratives they re - constructed about their encounters. It was there that the family first met /Toma, the leader of the band living at Gautscha who Lorna Marsh (!Kung 29 ce an anthropologist or graduate student to accompany them, not one ethnographer expressed interest in joining their expeditions in 1951 and 1952. Other scholars, however, did accompany them. Archeologist Robert Dyson and physical anthropologist Eric Willi ams joined the expedition in 1951, and J.O. Brew, Director of the Harvard Peabody Museum, met the Marshalls in Namibia for a month in 1952. Namibian farmer Fritz Metzgar and local official Claude V. McIntyre also joined the 1952 expedition. 30 In his forwa rd to Lorna Marshall Nyae Nyae !Kung Beliefs and Rites (1999), Charles Simic writes that the Marshall family consulted many renowned anthropologists before leaving for southern Africa in 1952 including: Clyde Kluckhoh n, a specialist in Navajo lan guages and culture at Harvard; J.O. Brew, director of the Peabody Museum; paleontologist Phillip Tobias and anthropologist Raymond Dart, both at the University of Witwatersrand at Johannesburg; Monica Wilson, a social anthropol ogist at the University of Capetown; and L.F. Maingard, a South African expert on Khoisan languages. 83 /Toma figured as the heroic protagonist of their accounts, a man who seemed to trust th em, let them live with his family, and even went so far as to grant the Marshalls familial names, incorporating them into the social structure of his band. The group spent somewhere between six amily and decided to return the following year to resume their study. 31 expedition in which they lived with Bushmen at three different sites in the Kalahari, collecting e to the few consistent waterholes in the desert rather than roam their territories to gather the unity to interact with and observe the daily life of many more people than they would have otherwise (3 - 4). Over the course of one year, the expedition camped at three different waterholes located in the Kalahari: a permanent waterhole called /Gam in the s outh, a site in the north known as Tsho/ana, and the Gautscha Pan in the central region of the desert. The Marshalls were warmly received on this second visit to Gautscha by / Toma and his family band. It was on this trip that they attracted the attention o f many other small bands of who travelled to Gautscha to see the white Americans who had come to film and study them. 31 substantial discrepancy in their stories abou t the duration of their time spent at Gautscha in 1951. In 1976, Lorna wrote that the expedition spent only six weeks living with the people at Gautscha while in 1958, Elizabeth recalls spending four months there. 84 entertaining and gathered in large groups to answer questions about their beliefs and customs, sometimes confirming what the Marshalls already knew and at other times correcting or contradicting information given by other informants (9). Following the custom of anthropologists, the Marshalls regularl y paid people who volunteered information about their culture with tobacco, cocoa, coffee, tea, salt, sugar, and empty cans; upon leaving the region in 1953, they awarded more substantial gifts to their most regular informants to thank them for their time and cooperation (9 - 10). By the time they left the Kalahari, Lorna Marshall reports meeting The archive of materials that they collected on this expedition became the source material their f irst scholarly articles, books. What makes the Marshall expeditions distinctive in the history of twentieth - century ethnographic visuality is their collective transformation from amateur observers to expert st arrived in southern Africa in 1951 they were hardly more than ambitious tourists; within twenty years they were experts whose texts were considered required reading for anthropologists studying hunter - gatherer societies since the nd 1961, the family made eight expeditions to the Kalahari and became n life, collectively producing two ethnographic monograph, numerous academic articles, two travelogues, one novel, and a film and audio archive that includ es 23 documentary films, one video series, 29 unpublished films, and over 309 hours of audiotaped interviews. 32 Their archive effectively created a sub - discipline within anthropology 32 and Video Collection is currently held at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Another archive of ethnographic photographs from the expedition is housed at the Harvard Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology. 85 and inspired a generation of anthropologists to turn their attention to th involvement in the politics of Nyae Nyae were still remote and supported themselves solely by hunting and gathering on land that they had lived on for as far back as anyone living at that time could remember. By 1960, the Na mibia. As private parties and corporations moved to develop land for commercial purposes like farming, mining, and tourism, the South African parliament began to reclassify certain lands groups was called landscape and therefore ill - equipped to exercise authority over it. John Marshall puts the problem wastebasket into which thousands of people living in communal lands were dumped (8). By n people were removed from their land, forbidden to hunt or gather food, and relocated to housing projects i n Tshumkwe, the capital city of their newly - Eastern Bushmanland. The - paying jobs for white farmers and officials or made exploitation wages at the Consolidated Diamond Mines for survival. Their communi ties were plagued by the diseases of poverty: alcoholism, domestic violence, and crime. n dressing in skins, hunting with bows and arrows, and performing dances in th eir films. The most famous of these directors is Jamie Uys, whose The Gods Must Be Crazy film franchise in the 86 exposed to tuberculosis and leprosy and as a result, t he death rate soared. they fought to regain control of their lands, drill ground - water wells, and establish subsistence farming communities. Both Lorna and Elizabeth hav e written about the changed living far. After expressing his allegian expelled from South Africa and not permitted re - entry until 1978, when he received funding from PBS to make the documentary film N!ai, Story of a Kung Woman (1980). What he found when he returned to mission. In collaboration with anthropologist Claire Ritchie, Marshall worked to create the p decades he produced over twenty films about the people he originally met in 1951, the last of which was the five - part series A Kalahari Family (2002) that self - consciously documented and reflected upon his thirty - year relationship with /Toma and his family band. The Marshall expeditions themselves played a part in bringing the violence of the outside world to the indigenous communities they studied and all of the family members have readily acknowledged the unintended consequences of their trips through the Kalahari. Lorna Marshall writes that no government first commissioner of the Office of Bushmen Affairs, joined the family expedition in 1951 (13). 87 Lorna, Elizabeth, and John Marshall have all observed that the tracks that their convoy c ut Marshall expeditions paved the way for the oppression and exploi tation of the indigenous people they found so fascinating. The numerous texts that they published from their encounters with the they appealed to their audie Ju/hoansi are as much reflections of their own individual subjectivity as they are derived from the conventions of discipline and media. In the close read ings that follow, I attempt to locate the idiosyncratic in each text by paying careful attention to the ways that their distinct rhetorical c hoices reflect their individual identit ies, preoccupations, and goals. For instance, it is clear to me that Lor na M not only manifest s the conventions of academic writing but also reflects her personal struggle to claim the authority to make scholarly arguments in a male - dominated field, ins titution, and culture oice of characters and events were heavily influenced by an emergent U.S. brand of feminism as well as y as an epic story of masculine 88 hunting prowess most certainly reflects his own preoccupations as much as it conforms to the conventions of post - later books and films can be r ead as apologies or even projects of restitution for the collateral damage caused by their first repres re - reading the first texts they produced reminds us of a time in the twentieth century when seemed possible. As iterations of an ethnographic visuality that has long since been thoroughly dismantled by post - structural, feminist, and post - colonial reading n being in its most primitive form. 89 A VISION FROM ABOVE ethnographic monograph The ! Kung of Nyae Nyae deals in the quantifiable realm of factual data. As a n anthropological study, her writing is shaped by a disciplinary investment in presenting a dictates that the idiosyncratic recede from view in order to identify the - group behavior. Part of that convention, of course, means casting aside the subjective, reflective voice of travel narrative or memoir and adopting the scholarly voice of the ethnographer. 33 As her first book - length scholarly p roject, the text that Marshall produces manifests some - day - journey through 150 miles of the Kalahari in detail, listing a series of setbacks that would be familiar to any traveler in the region: their convoy of trucks carrying gasoline, water, food, and gear get stuck in the sand boiled clean after they are clogged by the seeds of tall grasses; the frame of one of their trucks even breaks in two over the strain (14 ). Marshall follows this litany of obstacles with a curious Directly addressing her reader, the anthropologist in Marshall apologizes for her momentary lapse into the familiar discourse of travel writing in which complaining about the difficulties of 33 It is important to note that the scholarly voice I describe here has undergone significant revision since the - reflexive rhetorical moves in their scholarly writing, self - conscious ly reflecting on their own subject position in the field and the ways that their subjectivity inflects their meaning - making practices. 90 travel itself is common. Here, Marshall makes plain how she work s to conform to the conventions of scholarly writing, a rhetorical move that hints at what is at stake in making her claims. To distinguish herself from the conventions of the tourist travelogue she explains what she considers the anthropological value of such descriptions. It is precisely because the region is Despite the tone of cool reserve that Marsha ll adopts to make declarative statements about Ju/hoan history, physiognomy, and behavior, her uniquely warm authorial voice often has hat was going on in the Bushmen world when she was there, have made her ethnographies intrigues Biesele. Punctuating her text with vivid descriptions of wha t she observed in the field gives her readers the impression that they are granted a unique access to the subjects of her study The way Marshall introduces the relationship between South African government officials and Ju/hoan people in her study illustrates her particularly deft technique. After simply stating that the then Department of Native Affairs of South West Africa established two posts at the edge of Ju/ hoa n hoof - and - mouth disease [ and] disinfect tires and boots , Marshall proceeds to describe an encounter between the subjects of her study and outsiders: 91 We had the opportunity to obser ve the !Kung contacts with the Bantu there. When the convoys especially those returning from the mines arrived, all the almost naked, slender, little brown !Kung men would stand in groups staring with awe at the big, black Ovambo with their mine uniforms, boots, helmets, headlights, and sunglasses, and their sewing machines and whatever other worldly goods they were bringing home to their wives. This was indeed the outside world to those !Kung. They told us explicitly that they feel shy, naked, and inferior in the presence of these big black men with their goods. (7) Here, Marshall walks a fine line between the voice of the storyteller and the voice of the expert. The anthropologist strategically layers information in this passage, bookending highly - visual d escriptive writing with declarative statements. First, readers learn about the establishment of outposts, their purpose, and the kinds of encounters that they generate between distinct ethnic groups: the Ju/hoa n people that Marshall is there to observe and travel through the region. What comes next, however, show readers what that encounter looks like to a third - party observer. In carefully - crafted prose, Marshall makes distinctions between the , , and barely clothed while the modernization. The gulf between these groups of African men, it seems, is defined as much by their physiognomy as by th eir relationship to industrialization. The Bantu men are miners, thoroughly acculturated to and actively participating in modern economies, while the Ju/hoansi objects from a modern material culture. In the sentence that follows, the anthropologist asserts miners, ethnographic data that verifies her own impressions of t he scene. 92 uneasily alongside the cool reserve of the declarative mode the writer uses to claim her authority to interpret what she observes. Any good travel writer could come to similar conclusions about this moment of intercultural encounter simply from recording their observations of this event and reflecting on its meaning. An ethnographer, on the other hand, collects data systematically. Marshall can include this moment in her study because she can make the case that her observations are not simply anecdotal, but is instead illustrate feelings that many of her subje cts reported in interviews she conducted in the field as an ethnographer. A gifted writer with an ear for literary language, Marshall could have chosen to write s uggests her desire to be taken seriously as an expert in her field of study. Though she was highly educated and an English teacher at Mount Holyoke College when Marshall first travelled to the Kalahari in 1950, anthropologists would not have considered her much more than a privileged housewife or perhaps a university patron during the years she collected data, the 34 Thus, the text that she ended up producing from the data she collected during those years was not warmly re ceived by all experts in her field. Both her lack of formal training and her privileged entrée into academic circles cast a shadow of doubt over the value of her scholarship. Clearly, Marshall adopted the conventions of anthropological 34 Anthropologist Megan Biesele gives an account of Lorna Marshall contributions to ethnography in her introduction to a 1 B.A. in Literature from UC Berkeley in 1921 and an M.A. in Literature from Radcliff College in 1928. In addition to teaching at Mount Holyoke, she taught sevent h - grade English at the Lee School in Boston for two years after community service groups in Cambridge, including the League of Women Voters (11). 93 writing to give her analysis. Ethnography is a form of writing that shares an audience, disciplinary goals, and pologists George Marcus and Dick Cushman identified nine conventions of a genre they called century fiction (29). 35 In broad strokes, they define ethnography as writing that represents a perience to authenticate their claims (31 - 34). Marcus and Cushman may have generated their list to demonstrate how the increasingly experimental argument denaturaliz literary narrative and ethnography. The point of the ethnographic monograph, they suggest, is to make culture legible to readers by writing in the voice that combines the distance of the observer with the immersion of the participant. Marshall organizes her study to give readers an totalizing overview of her subject, moving from a discussion of the ext available sources of food, to an analysis of their internal culture and its attendant rituals. This organizing schema accomplishes two things. First, it shifts focus from the abst raction of the 35 structure of total ethnography; 2) the unintrusive presence of the ethnographer in the text; 3) common denominator people; 4)the marking of fieldwork experience; 5) the focus on everyday life situations; 6) representation of native point of view; 7) the stylistic extrapolation of particular data; 8) embellishment by jargon; - 37). 94 closer to the subjects of her gaze. Second, this arrangement re - creates the perspective of an ethnographic observer, a figure who typically be gins their work in the field as an outsider before increasingly taking on the role of cultural insider privy to the more intimate details of their subjects of her study and speaking to them in their own language. Through her strategic incorporation of charts, graphs, and photographs, the anthropologist gives readers substantial ng, the n dialect of the Khoisan language, further testifies to this fact. The authorial persona t hat Marshall creates is quite different, however , from the voice of the heroic e thnographer that Bronislaw Malinowski famously crafted in Argonauts of the Western Pacific . Like Malinowski, Marshall opens her study with a narrative about her entry to to the Kalahari Desert to conduct - long struggle for authority in stark terms. Calling the expeditions in which she co llected the anthropologist immediately characterizes her project as a shared venture before handing over the ownership of the project to her husband, the one f amily member who never authored a text about is kind of sentence would seem to belong on the acknowledgments page rather rectly undermine the expertise that she works so hard to establish in the remainder of her study. 95 This opening line prompts certain questions. What kind of scholar begins their study by subordinating their own role in conceiving of and carrying out their research? What does it say who identifies as a wife and mother first and a scholar second could write that sentence. Given that she conducted her fieldwork at a t ime when academic institutions were still predominantly male, it is not surprising that Marshall found it difficult to inhabit the authorial voice of the which she bases her study gives her reader a glimpse into the mind of a woman struggling to write herself into the masculine role of anthropologist. While Marshall may have intended to establish her expertise and legitimize her claims in this first chapter of h er study, what she actually does is introduce readers to her unique authorial personae as the matriarch of the Marshall expeditions. In contrast to Malinowski who derived his authority from his role as a singular, heroic outsider living among the subjects of his study, n family at Nyae Nyae that she observes and the Marshall family in which she is central. matriarch of the Marshall expeditions. This gendered identity is reflected in her study in many k, marriage rites, and child - rearing because as a female ethnographer those were the practices she was privy to in a culture with a gender - specific division of labor. On the other hand, her maternal role in the field also inflects the form of her study, ch anging the way she actually records data. In a section matter - of - 96 practiced out scientist in Marshall recognized the value of including tha the matriarch of the Marshall family admits that the subject of infanticide provokes a powerful establishing limitations on her intellectual curiosity and marking a proverbial line in the sand not to be crossed, even for the sake of capturing comprehensiv e data. The !Kung of Nyae Nyae is a rich text for literary analysis because it manifests the fault demonstrates the visual protocols that were an integral part of the rhetorical conventions of anthropology, it also illustrates her struggle to maintain the illusion of a natural, masculine authority over her subject matter. Because visual elements like photographs and graphics are commonly used in anthropology to prov moments representational practices at a particular historical moment. Like any deconstructive literary erself than about the Ju/'hoansi culture she describes. What emerges is an image of a woman caught between competing, culturally - specific kinds of authority: matriarch and ethnographer. Sometimes these roles are complementary, but often they are not. Readi ng moments where these two identities come into conflict reveals much about two cultures: the American upper middle 97 ------------- Marshall uses photographs to position her text firmly within a history of ethnogra phic visuality. Much of her writing gestures toward the many photographs she incorporates into her study, images that illustrate her claims and authenticate her authority to make them. In the context of her discussion about the evolutionary history and phy instance, she inserts a photograph meant to illustrate the physical appearanc e of her subjects . According to its lengthy caption, the photo depicts the interaction between three men: Keara , a blonde son; and Ladino John shake hands in the foreground on the left side of the frame while Ledimo looks on and three n boys play in the background, most prominently Tsamgao, the headman / son, who appears in the center of the frame. image shows the physical trai ts of her subjects and implicitly, it verifies her description of the n people they met. The s small - with the other two figures, one a white American and the other a black African (33). However, it n 98 chapters, testifies that she was, in fact, a first - es. All of the photographs that Marshall chooses to include in her study provide a kind of evidence that is crucial to her anthropological project, but this image in particular gives readers photograph demonstrates the n person but her own son, John Marshall. Clearly, a proud mother selected this shot from all the photographs that were taken on this n man, this image enough that M show her reader evidence of these traits (ix). Positioned at the highest point of the frame and facing t he camera, John Marshall effectively upstages both Kuara and Ledimo in this shot. The caption assures us that Kuara is clearly see his expression. What we can s ee is Jo cues that signal something as ambiguous and culturally - determined as a warm greeting are made legible through Marshall to establishing meaningful cross - cultural relationships. Images do not come with fixed m eanings, of course, but are assigned meaning through context. Pairing each of the photos in her study with a deftly - written caption that didactically 99 tells readers how to interpret what they see, Marshall harnesses the indexical power of the photographic t o authenticate her project and legitimize her observations. The many portraits of n this strategy. Arranged by gender and age, Marshall selects photographs of young women, children, a young boy, and an aged woman and man to illustrate a wide range of physical detailed captions, like the photograph of a young woman id - is used to illustrate the black pigmentation of the breasts and the patterns of facial scarification that Marshall claims are aged woman smiling at someone on the right side of the frame, are assigned simple, one - line / Perhaps the most troubling of these images is a full - body portrait of a woman used to - century Europe as t the unnamed woman becomes an exemplary figure used simply to demonstrate a physical trait Marshall labels atypical and identifies as a medical condition. In one of the longest captions in her study, Marshall explains that steatopygia is fairly rare among n n wo men do exhibit (41). While all the other photograph draws attention to the singularity of a physical trait, posing questions about the 100 s for including it at all. Marshall takes great pains to situate the photograph as evidence that confirms the findings of anthropologists studying incidents of con stitutes a response to questions in her field. The sensationalism attending this image, particular unconsciously systematically deconstruct. singles out an import ant character like / Toma, whose portrait appears as a frontispiece to the / Toma functions as the natural leader of his family band, a man who is clownish at time s, playful, and gentle, yet struggles to maintain his way of life in a rapidly changing world. As the n life, / Toma is transformed from man to / Toma the title announces will be the subject of the text. t of her larger about capturing the specificity of its subject, but ethnographic portraits do just the opposite, framing individual people as representat ive members of a group. Portrait photographers and ethnographers both take interest in markings on the body of their subjects but for very different reasons. While a painter may pay attention to a tattoo or a prominent scar because those physical 101 markings convey the individuality and specificity of their subject, ethnographers regard those same markings as indicators of cultural ideas of beauty or as evidence of a cultural rite of culture, the representational practices of ethnography privilege the group. visually organizing many kinds of ethnographic data. Detailed kinship charts, designed to il n society, form a particularly large part of her study. Tracing kinship ties is a common practice for ethnographers as it is often the first step toward piecing together a historical narrative fo r cultures that do not record their own respectfully to the past, [but] they are not history - minded. They make no effort to hold actual past events systematicall For a woman travelling with her own family, discussing, comparing, and recording familial ties / n names, establishing kinship relationships seems to have been a priority for both family bands: / into strata and substrata based on generation. Simple geometric shapes like circles and triangles denote individual people, their gender, and their absence or presence from the band in 1952, the year that Marshall recorded kinship information at Nyae Nyae. Lines, on the other hand, denote 102 relationships between those individuals: single lines signify either parent - child or sibling through a double line accounts for r elationships dissolved by divorce. Names, titles, and additional information used to differentiate individuals with similar names appear directly under their symbol on the chart, along with individual identification numbers. The graphic that results from t his highly - orchestrated synthesis of information works at what Edward Tufte has called - dimensional, it visually organizes many layers of temporal and spatial information. Every stories about births and deaths, how individual relationships have changed over time, and ultimately how those changing relationships have affected the structure of !Kung bands. The synthetic visual eff ect of the chart Nyae in 1952. While the graphic provides a macro account of Ju/hoa n culture, it also invites micro readings of the individual subjects of Mar Graphic representations of data require an active reader, one who is willing to locate and interpret multiple layers of information simultaneously. Although kinship relationships may appear relatively straightforward, the descriptive inform ation about each represented individual that Marshall includes on the chart adds another layer of narrative information. Tufte suggests recast and pers onalize d an effect that gives viewers some level of interpretive control over information (50). Considering the scholarly audience of anthropological writing, it is easy to see why organizing information into visually rich, graphic displays is an 103 cultural analysis; they also participate in creating meaningful interpretations of her data for her field. o engage and reward such active reading practices. The layered narrative threads embedded within the multiple symbolic registers of her n game called Tsi Tsi Gwara visualizes data in a very different way, prompting readers to imagine the frenetic animation of bodies in motion through annotations on a two - dimensional surface. phic pushes at its own formal boundaries to represent a game in medias res. in this particular game as inherited knowledge, passed down from gen eration to generation, and therefore establishes the anthropological value of her account. What follows is a lengthy description of the game that she witnessed: eight players held hands in a circle and then danced, sometimes stumbling and making themselves fall down, but all the while holding hands while they wind and unwind into different formations. The story that she tells conveys the spirit of the game players without c game is communal, that there are often spectators who watch from the sidelines, and t hat the play is boisterous and silly. 104 more orderly event . Seven players, identified by letters A through H, collectively perform a series of movements that are divided into s even, numerically - labeled steps. Fine lines between individual players signify that they are connected by holding hands while curved arrows signify directional movement. The image that results strongly resembles dance notation, a stylistic choice that clea rly i llustrates the direction of motion and the sequence of steps involved in the game, both at the level of each individual stage and overall pattern. What dance notation visually implies, however, is the highly structured aesthetic of choreography. In sh written description of the lively jogging, shuffling, stumbling, and purposely falling down that are all part of the game, the bodies in motion in the graphic do not appear unruly or clownish. Instead, they are uniformly represen logics legible. It seems that where the graphic itself fails, Marshall supplements with descriptive language. The academic conventions of ethnographic writing both celebrate the representational possibilities of information graphics and recognize their limitations , for if charts and graphs could tell the whole story of a culture, why would anthropologists need to produce so much writing? It is through a strategic combination of written text and ima ges that anthropologists can present a truly holistic overview of any given culture and Marshall uses her facility with lyrical, descriptive writing to her full advantage. The anthropologist gives a multi - modal account of food gathering, for instance, the n women. The tenor of her careful, exacting writing makes it clear how much meaning Marshall attributes to the task 105 for gathering for herself, her family, and her dependents...Unless she is sick or disabled, she must not expect to be supported by others. Failure to provide her share would be weakening to the tences, Marshall defines food gathering as a task crucial to pregnant women and women carrying their babies on their backs gather for long hours in the desert heat, exhaustive and repetitive work, she stresses, because the stakes of not gathering food r egularly are too high. The declarative language of the anthropologist gives way to the lyrical cadence of the ably a child, moving on to find another root, digging again multiple clauses of this sentence simulate the repetitive nature of the work. A similar sentence structure appears a fe - four roots; thirty - four times she (106). Gleaning, Marshall observes, is a physically demanding and exhausting process . Gathering rewards the most indefatigable women and requires almost superhuman endurance. imagination of her readers, inviting them to envision the arduous task of g athering desert foods. but it is only one way that she presents this information. Photographic images and tables add another layer of visuality to the chapter. No less than three photographs of women gathering food are included in the cour se of three pages . In the first image, a single woman sits on the ground 106 digging fiercely at a stubborn root. To illustrate the depth of the hole, her arm is in the hole she has dug up to her elbow. On the following page, a photograph shows a woman apparently finding what the c aption tells us is a /ga root. Squatting close the ground, the unnamed woman wears her baby on her back and looks intently at the ground, away from the camera; in sharp owledging the stranger who insists on gathering images instead of food. A final photograph appears on the food they have gathered, and wood for their fires return shot, the image shows three anonymous women walking single file through long grass. Their bodies are dwarfed by the size of the bundles on their backs. s, this photographic tryptic makes meaning through accumulation. Once the first image establishes the physicality of the task at hand, the second image reinforces this visual fact and adds another piece of information, one that Marshall wants to highlight. Women do not perform any of their work alone but are always accompanied by a child , and because they carry children with them constantly and typically nurse children until they are around four years old, this is no small feat (103). Significantly, the seco acknowledging the presence of the camera, a feature that breaks the conventions of anthropological images. The final photograph pulls our gaze outward, shifting focus away from the individual woman busy at work to a group of women laden with the fruits of their labors. Carrying small children, desert foods, and firewood strapped to their bodies in the animal skins the final image in this seri es draws attention back to the collective. 107 repositioned as a task that requires a collective expenditure of time and energy to sustain the group at large. Here n women are never without their babies who accompany them on even the most arduous tasks. As a scientist, this fact does not bear repeating because it is simply an observation about cultural behavior. As a mother, however, Marshall is obviously impressed by the very physicality of this feat and wants her readers to appreciate the strengt n women who perform this labor on a daily basis. While the act of food gathering does not have the dramatic appeal of hunting for big game or sacrificial rituals, gruesome events that are often featured in ethnographic studies, Marshall fram es the difficult and constant work of gleaning veld foods as the hunt. Her ethnographic study bears the traces of the female writer, one attuned to the daily l abors of caring for families like birthing babies and raising children, collecting and preparing food, and attending to the elderly and the sick. Although The !Kung of Nyae Nyae accounts of the Mars ethnography to be the U r - text of the family archive. As a scientific document, it attempts to n culture and the expedition itself and frames ethnography that shows the seams 108 of anthropological writing and in so doing, renders legible the problems at the crux of - twentieth - century project. 109 LITERARY VISIONS he narrative that Elizabeth Marshall tells embraces the person al and subjective and is a story far more experiential than explanatory. Like all travelers, what Marshall sees is heavily inflected by her subjectivity and experiences. As a literary writer, however, she is fr ee to draw attention to the ways that her identity frames the acc n people they met in the Kalahari. Drawing attention to her identity as a white woman contextualizes and personalizes narrative point of view. Like other travel writing by women, her text bears wh at stories she chooses to tell (9). The kinds of tasks and experiences that she was able to observe and investigate gathering veld foods, a wedding, birth rituals, caring for children are n women. In a very pragmatic sense, like norms of two cultures, rules that govern wh ich bodies perform which tasks. Her desire to forge n people she meets is certainly part of a tradition of ethnographic fieldwork, but it is also the kind of preoccupation associated with an American bran d of femininity that privileges emotion, intimacy and interpersonal communication. those encounters can produce is central to her travel writing and to the feminist poli tics that are implicitly at stake 110 - offish, while at other times they seem almost childlike in their innocent acceptance of outsiders in their community. For her, however, the moment of first encounter is always a heightened experience laden with hidden meanings about both parties. The travel writer begins her narrative by describing ambiguous encounters with mysterious indigenous groups and steadily builds toward richer, more personal meetings with individuals that produce the kinds of cultural insights that Marshall seeks. Her first glimpse of ter traveling through unmapped territory, the - Bakalahari people a their babies, lithe young hunters, small, light - skinned, all carrying great loads of household distinct physicality who compared to the Bakalaharis, are smaller, - expedition stops to watch , the villagers move steadily forward, hardly acknowledging their n an unknowable, indecipherable image and holds out the promise of more substantial encounters to come. n 111 revealing themselves only when they are so inclined. In this instance, the expedition had come across a small group of huts, the remains of the fires on the gro und outside of them still warm, enough to find, the Marshalls d ecide to camp there and wait to see if any of them return. After half the party spends the afternoon away from camp, breaking fresh track through the veld with old, one young, in silhouette as they squatted by the fire, turning as we came to look at us, very anxiously waiting for the translators to return so they can com municate (35). The men are given food, tobacco, and a bucket of water but they remain cautious, apparently spooked by a rumor that a European farmer had lost seven horses and was looking for someone to blame. Marshall the party for policemen; in fact, their conversation horses and is too old to commit such a crime. The meeting continues in a series of similar misunderstandi ngs and misinterpretations: - consciously shifting his position, and Gai giv 112 before. The Marshalls try to gain their confidence by telling them a version of their own story. share the familial names given to them by / Toma, information which makes Ukwane and Gai hiding, they heard the trucks moving and returned to the site only to find the Marshalls still camped there. Assuming that they were surrounded by police, they had come to surrender. n detai - marked by volatile race - n people ev en within the isolation of the desert. Ukwane, Gai, and their family associate white people with the disciplinary force of the police a a fact that suddenly calls into question the fantasy that underwrites the entire narrati n innocence, but ins tead map a history of violence between outsider and native, modern and rt and to re - construct an accurate narrative from tracks and artifacts, a skill that reinforces her credibility to 113 n n men set t he stage for a third, more substantial encounter, one that establishes a foundation for meaningful cross - cultural relationships. Ukwane and Gai lead the party to where their people are hiding and once they signal that it is safe to come out, a young woman, carrying a baby on her hip, emerges from the tall grasses: name. head graciously. She looked me over carefully without really staring, which to Bushmen is rude. Then, having surely suspected that I was a woman, she put her hand on my breast gravely, and, finding that I was, gravely touched her own breast. Many Bushmen d o this; to them all Europeans look the same. Tsau si , she said. (42) Reminiscen t of iconic literary encounters, like the Tarzan and onvention narratives. In the case of Tarzan and Jane, t he meeting sparks a romance; f or Crusoe and Friday, two young women , one a white, privileged American and the other a n African living in 114 the open Kalahari, establishes the trust and intimacy between Marshall and Tsetchwe that drives her narrative forward and frames the rest of her impressions . R people, what Marshall draws our attention to instead in this passage is what the se characters have in common hall is a woman is what prompts her to speak and motivates her to make physical contact with the writer. If at least initially the ambiguity of the gendered body makes it possible for Tsetchwe to wonder if Marshall is, in fact, a woman , a misrecognition th at would seem to trouble the easy notion that gender categories are universally legible, this encounter ultimately suggests that communication between women has the potential to transcend cultural barriers. If a meaningful connection between self and other is ultimately what Marshall desires, her representation of this encounter suggests that she considers the shared experience of gender identity to be a useful way to establish a mutually - beneficial relationship. od as a universal category aligns with the second - wave feminist politics that inflect her authorial choices. The female characters that populate her story, for instance, are highly individuated, decisive, and powerful agents of action. ation of Tsetchwe is a case in point. There are many ways to write Tsetchwe as a character: as a purely representative n wife and mother; an earthy, maternal archetype; or a female counterpart to Gai, a young man introduced to the expedition party f irst. n women and a dynamic charac n people by the specificity of her appearance, personality, and history. We learn that Tsetchwe wears her hair long and a bit n women, that she is self - assured 115 breaks cultural conventions (41, 7 4). When describing a ritual dance performed by n men wav[ - whose behavior Marshall uses to illustrate the culture of human ancestors, but she i s also a singular subject whose idiosyncratic behavior distinguishes her from the g roup. Even peripheral female characters are granted a special kind of authorial attention. When beautiful girl in all Nyae Nyae , a character aptly nicknamed Beautiful Ungka by the expedition party, she shifts focus from th - - 166). In er suitor when she was thirteen, outwitted and escaped from an admirer who kidnapped her in the middle of the night, and forced a separation from her second husband after her in with Clearly, there is much more to say about Ungka and what makes her stor y worth telling has little brand of feminist agency and empowerment. At the core of the story that Marshall tells is a sustained, self - conscious meditation on the act of observation itself and its potential to locate meaning in the ambiguity of experience , a characteristic common to travel writing as a genre. In contrast to other literary forms, the 116 twentieth - century travelogue sits uneasily alongside memoir, journ alism, and anthropological characteristic fluctuation between observation and reflection, twentieth - century travelogues employ visual and interpretive practices clo sely aligned with ethnography to the extent that it can be difficult to draw clear distinctions between literary texts and anthropological ones. Jack London and George Orwell, for instance, wrote books that are both ethnographies of the working poor and ac counts of their journeys into the alternate realities of urban poverty. 36 Julia Emberley has shown that British travel writer Gertrude Bell classified the people she encountered on her journeys through Syria, Palestine, a an industrio - born tribe , (129). As James Clifford suggests, the representa twentieth century can blur the classificatory lines between literary writing and ethnography The analogous relationship between the visuality of ethnography and travel writing is a phenomenon closely linked to twentieth - century modernity, but the travelogue has long been a form deeply invested in the illustrative power of images. After all, the travelogue is, in its most basic iteration, a record of a journey and what the autho r sees along the way. Historically, travel writers have relied upon a mix of descriptive writing and actual images to appeal to the 36 Jack Londo People of the Abyss - consciously took to observe and record the poverty he witnessed there. Likening his journey to that of the was open to b e convinced by the evidence of my eyes, rather than by the teachings of those wh o . Down and Out in Paris and London a dishwasher in Paris The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) documents the poverty of industrial and mining towns in northern England and the people who live there . In both texts, Orwell describes characters he considers rep resentative types, transcribes dialect, and poses pragmatic solutions to the social problems his identifies. 117 places. The heterogeneity o f the form can be traced from the early modern conventions of - century use of portraiture through the nineteenth - century investment in the indexicality of the photographic image. While the r elationship between image and text in each of these iterations is quite different, taken together these examples historically link the travelogue to the changing technologies of visual culture. ore than a little reminiscent of nineteenth - century travel writing about Africa. The famed missionary and explorer David Livingstone also documented his journey through the region in his 1856 Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa , a narrative t pan at most seasons.. [that] was filled with water, something that had not happened since Livingstone was t fine - The Harmless Peop le and Travels and Researches extend beyond their similar use of descriptive language to their to see Lake Ngami is also one of the more visually vexed moments in his travelogue. After a - pan for the lake because of the glare of the sun, an effect that so 118 preo through the historical specificity of their subjectivity and politics. precisely what propels her narrative forward, particularly in the early chapters of her book dedicated solely e - tuned observational eye capable of noticing the smallest traces of human life left on the environment, like a small pile of residual ash from a spent fire, a piece of worked leather, or a sharpened digging stick accidentally forgotten in the rush to hide from outsiders approaching camp. dome - shaped huts made out of grass, blend into their environment so seamlessly that they are all but invisible to the untrain ed observer. n camp site for the first time is, above all else, a moment of visual transformation: little scherms , or huts, hidden in the grass until I noticed a small skin bag dangling in a shadow, which was a doorway. Then I saw the frame of the scherm around it, then the other scherms as well. (8) The utter strangeness of this memory comes from its peculiar visua l logic. To notice one small detail, a piece of leather dangling out of place in the environment, is to notice another and another until a hidden, miniature world suddenly emerges from the emptiness of the desert landscape. This passage introduces readers to unfamiliar, anthropologically - specific terms like 119 - imagines observation as a way of seeing that can magically reveal unseen aspects of the human experience. Marshall returns to the transformative vis uality of this early experience throughout the n men lead her party to their band later in the text, this startling domestic space remains illegible until one mark on the landscape reveals the rest of the site: At last we noticed on the other side of the tree two shallow depressions scooped in the sand and lined with grass, like the shallow, scooped nests of shore birds on a beach the would show that people lived there. Later we saw another scooped pit and a stick thrust (39 - 40) Even when outsiders are led to the site and shown where to look, they apparently still have domestic space resembles eith er something unremarkable, like the indistinct repetitions of desert bush, or something animalistic, like a nesting ground. According delicate, fr uninitiated observer can easily destroy entire villages and endanger potential relationships with native informants simply because they cannot read the visible traces o f human life on the environment. 120 Moments like these literalize the tenuousness of a disappearing hunter - gatherer culture by ays poses a threat to authentic native culture, a formulation that recalls the troubling paradox at the heart of anthropology that Claude Lévi - Strauss famously described as the quintessential dilemma of the twentieth - century traveler. - whose very presence threatens the existence of the authentic primitive he desires to find, for once contact is made the native enters a global economy of cultural exchange (45). Like Lévi - Strauss, Marshall mourns the unintentional destruction of indigenous material culture by outsiders with their big boots and ungainly movements, and her preoccupation with the fragility of primitive objects belies a deeper concern for an indigenous co mmunity vulnerable to corruption and destruction by the world outside the Kalahari. observers of the natural world. After all, the ability to read the fine permutati ons of the monotonous desert landscape is a skill necessary for survival in the Bush. Marshall clearly admires what she considers a finely - tuned observational eye and supplies her readers with many notice the most miniscule traces of animal and plant life in the desert. When hunting, Bushmen can track the footprints of an the unique characteristics of the foo tprint so they can discern it from the footprints of the herd; when gathering food, they can tell which dried vines mark edible, water - filled roots below n hunters poison the tips of their arrows with liquid extracted from the pupa e of a certain Diamphidia simplex beetle, a process that Marshall writes could only be 121 c t and who investigate all For her, a careful observational eye is a cha n particularly harsh environment. What Marshall sets into play here is a strange reversal of typical ethnographic looking - seeing eye of the ethnographic observer, her carefully crafted narrative highlights her own struggle to vastly superior observers of the presenting a clear vision of that culture to her reader. Curiously, Marshall asks her readers to accept that a narrator who is s o completely bewildered by the deceptive visuality of the Kalahari n culture. It is precisely this contradictory tension between the content of the narrative and its contextual frame that resolv n people observing and interpreting natural phenomena, Marshall demonstrates her skills as an astute ethnographic observer of human beh avior. Implicit in these conspicuous repetitions is her assertion that while the n narrator and r eaders are never privy to a n point of view. Instead, we are asked to look at tracks and carefully discern their hidden meanings. Aligned with the writer, a perpetual outsider, readers can never access anything n subjectivity but we can n hunters who are the objects of our shared gaze. 122 As a literary device, the peculiar visuality of these looking relations complicates any simplistic notion that that the white, Western, highly educated, and privileged expedition team is ability to read a seemingly illegible landscape and the layered series of gazes that she self - consciously constructs undermines the power relations implicit in ethnographic visuality. world also implies that such vision is what part of what d Although by her own account Marshall cannot see and interpret nature, she emerges as an astute observer of culture, a device that ultimately reinforces her narrative authority to represent her indigenous subjects. Ju st as she opens her travelogue with a series of three visual encounters of her , she closes her book with three enigmatic final glimpses of the desert landscape and the people w ho live there. Her last view of Gautsha Pan, the dry lake that fills with water in the rainy season, approximates an experience of the sublime: held our breath with the majesty of it, its great solitude, the great drama of sun set going on reflected in its water for no eyes to look at; and when the sun was down and the colors of the veld were dull and dark we started in , but that was an impressive last look at a place and the last I ever saw of Gautsha Pan. (260) This final glim are reflected in the once again suggesti ng that even while witnessing a spectacular sunset, somehow the natural world is withheld from her gaze. 123 m their temporary camp, she notices a single member of / Lazy Kwi watched us out of sight. I saw him standing among the thorn trees, smaller and smaller in the distance, and just 1). Even among all the visual confusing moments in she choose ess as the one who notices his presence. Both subjects in this short passage, Lazy Kwi and Marshall herself, are wa a phrase that is part of everyday vernacular yet seems to pinpoint the perplexing visuality at work here. Af ter all, to focus on what is visible up until the point it is rendered invisible is to engage in the strangely self - conscious practices of observation that Marshall dwells on in her travelogue at length. not actually a glimpse at all but instead is a visual confirmation of the unearthly sounds of desert creatures at night. While camping nearer, a rattle, a rumble of a the writer n people scattered around an abandoned camp gives the party vital information about their 124 whereabouts. Recasting this earlier moment in reverse, M arshall suggests that her transformation as an observer has come full circle. Where in the beginning of her story she tracks only confirm what she already knows. outset that her narrative is a personal one. What emerges from her story is a reflection of 125 John Ma The Hunters was met with critical acclaim and is still regularly hailed as a classic of ethnographic documentary. The year following its release, the film won the Robert J. Flaherty Award for Best Documentary from the British Film Instit ute and in 2003, it was added to the U.S. National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. Screened regularly in the a world unchanged by modern civilization (Martinez 146). Later, Marshall regretted the way his film mythologized t explicitly trying to rewrite this narrative. - over food is scarce. Silent images appear in quick succession: a dry, brown plant waves in the wind; a dun - colored bird, barely visible in the thorny branches of a bush, flutters its wings; a bird of prey perches high atop a leafless tree; a dusty lizard scurries into its den. When human bodies materialize onscreen they are accompanied by the first instance of sound in the film, a simple n song that slowly intensifies as two men walk through the frame. Wearing no thing but leather thongs and carrying slim, lightweight quivers full of arrows, the men wander somewhat distractedly across the screen; one of them even glances casually at the camera before returning his gaze to the ground. The sequence that follows repea ts this pattern, shifting back to a series of silent images of giraffes chewing their cud, a brightly - colored butterfly, and a deer barely visible 126 in tall grass before returning to a shot of the men examining an animal den in the desert rock as n mu sic plays, once again fusing sound and image. distinct worlds: the silence of animal life and the rich, music - filled experience of human be ings. While we do not hea r !Kung speech, the combination of voice that we hear in the musical track and gesture that we see onscreen marks the human world as the site of both art and language. Human and animal worlds in the film are not completely discrete here since cross - cutting between images of animals and human beings creates a visual connection, if not conflation, - n bodies with animal ones while at the same time making an aural distinction between human and animal experience. es this distinction by making the In less than ten shots, the film tells us everything we need to know to understand the story ahari and like the other forms of life that thrive there, they have adapted to a particularly harsh environment. Immediately The Hunters is framed as a tale of human endurance and survival, thematic territory that recalls one of ethnographic Nanook of the North . This first impression is only in the search for food and water: men track prey, a family shares a drink ou t of a waterhole, and diegetic world of scarcity and privation and provide a narrative motivation for the five - day 127 giraffe hunt at the heart of the film. There are m any ways to glean food from the Kalahari but the film privileges hunting, a task exclusively reserved for men, by suggesting that the meat from large game is the most coveted source of veld food and the most difficult to obtain. but it is the one that has been most heavily critiqued by anthropologists. Since the film was n food culture determined that their tradition al diet was not only nutritionally sound but rich in proteins and calories and even further, noted that n diet, like the mongongo nut, even in drought years. 37 Marshall himself agreed with that critique. In his 1993 essay Filming and Learning While /Toma did in fact shoot a giraffe with a poisoned arrow, Marshall writes that he actually shot the animal from a movi tes candidly about the process of making his first film in this essay, admitting that his cinematographic choices were inflected by his personal interpretation of events, that he edited the film to privilege a forward - moving narrative, and that many of his artistic choices, from the - over narration, were strongly influenced by literary fiction writers like Herman Melville and William Faulkner rather than by anthropological facts. 37 In her book Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman (1981), anthropologist Marjorie Shostak cites Richard ms to most contemporary ideas of good - rounded in typical years. 128 Ultimately, Marshall retrospectiv ely described The Hunters Marshall readily acknowledges that all f ilms, even ethnographic documentaries, are not only behind the camera. While this idea may obvious to current filmmakers and scholars, the notion that eth nographic documentaries are inscribed by the subjectivity of the filmmaker was hotly umentary by defining anthropological films as fieldwork - based evidence. compares the problematic romanticism of The Hunters to Flahe Mostly, Marshall description of his earliest film foregrounds his own identity when he made it as a 20 - year - - 53. He had become a filmmaker when his father gav e him a Bell & Howell 16 millimeter camera and a copy of Notes and Queries , the canonical handbook for collecting ethnographic data, and assigned him the task of making a film record o Reflecting back on this experience, Mars hall recalls that he had no formal training but simply learned as he went. In the beginning, he used a tripod to set up each shot and keep the camera still, a technique that made filming a slow process and required his subjects to stop, reset and repeat ac tions many times to ensure that Marshall caught events on film to his satisfaction. As he grew more comfortable with the camera, he became more ambitious, shooting from moving vehicles and n kids - 129 action (Anderson and Benson 140). He also grew particular about capturing an image of a regularly out of the background of shots and avoiding fi lming any members of the expedition n people. Upon his return to Cambridge, Marshall worked in post - production with ethnographic filmmaker Robert Gardner at Harvard to edit his first footage into a film that would be coherent to Wes tern audiences. Certainly anthropologically - sound one. n life that Marshall originally recorded did not conform to the conflict/resolution form at that drives fiction film, but imposing that schema onto the footage provided one way to organize those disjointed images into a narrative easily understood by Western audiences. Combined with the lyrical, often meditative tone of his voice - over, Marshal translate n behavior for cultural outsiders while also creating narrative urgency and dramatic appeal. Once n community needs meat to survive, the hunting scenes that m ake up the rest of the film gain in intensity, drama, and urgency. Each time a hunter fails to make a kill, the film tells us, is one more day that passes without meat for their hungry families waiting numerous scenes of hunting might seem to glorify spectacular acts of maiming and killing the same wild animals that Western audiences are used to admiring in the benign setting of the zoo, particularly the grizzly finale in which the hunters surround and kill a wounded giraffe with their spears. - en there had been no meat in the werft for a month since 130 Following shots of the empty werft, or temporary village, the viewer sees a young woman nursing her infant ch - remained at home was !U, / / - over is quite brief, it very particular, !U, a young mother whose needs extend beyond h erself to her infant. As the most vulnerable member of the small community,!U and / - over continues, reinforcing the connection between the infant and / Toma decided to out hunting that day. The This moment is the first iteration of what becomes a powerful repetition. In the scene that follows the hunt, meat is distributed to each family group. Marshall somewhat poetically of !U breastfeeding her child, looking off into the the hunt, the film / and so is his ability to make a substantial kill. Counterintuitively, the film ma nages to bypass 131 attitudes of a young Marshall fascinated with not only satisfies an immediate desire for sustenance but also preserves the culture that the film seeks to document. The success of visually and aurally imposing this logic onto his footage is debatab le. reliance on non - synchronous sound creates a disjunction between the image and sound tracks (261). The specificity of the story that Marshall sets out to tell gets lost in abstractions about human nature, universalizing interpretations. Even more damning, Nichols claims that understanding precisely what happens in the film becomes nearly impossible (260). Marshall edited footage taken of many hunts over a period of sev en years to create the illusion of watching one, continuous event (Barbash and Taylor 69). hunters often changes and their exact location in the desert is uncertain. It is pos sible that Marshall exploits the confused visuality that his sister Elizabeth describes in her travelogue here by assuming that Western audiences would be unable to recognize the individual characteristics smatches in the desert landscape, making the possibility of perceiving continuity errors slim to none. 38 38 Karl Heider makes a s Bushmen or even different giraffes le who have seen The Hunters noticed the changes 132 investment in the indexicality and authenticity of the film image. He privileges The Hunters as an example of the troubling ethics posed by ethnographic film in his 1981 book Ideology and the Image , arguing that The Hunter s makes an instructive case study for the ideological problems at a representation, effacing the specificity of its subjects by positioning them as primitiv types compares The Hunters Nanook of the North Dead Bir ds (1963), films that he also critiques for their tendency toward abstraction and fantasy. 39 Nichols is not the first scholar to make the comparison between Marshall and Flaherty and for good reason . Visual anthropologists Jay Ruby, Isla Barbash and Lucie n Taylor all note the thematic similarities between The Hunters filmmakers tell archetypal stories about human survival in a hostile environment (11; 29) . Heider association with the forefather of documentary. t out of a fragmented archive of hunting footage certainly and attribute interiority to his subjects through voice - 39 As Director of the Film Study Center at Harvard, Robert Gardner mentored Marshall and helped him transform his footage into a narrative film. Gardner also obtained the footage for Dead Birds , his first film, from a Harvard - Peabody Expedition to New Guinea where he studied the war rituals of the Dani people. Like Marshall, Gardner attributes subjectivity to his subjects solely through voice - over, poetically narrating their thoughts and fe elings. 133 overlooked in their comparison between Flaherty and Marshall, however, is the participatory viewing experience that both filmmakers create for the viewer. While their films are designed to give viewers the impression that they are watching events film , neither filmmaker present s events in the one long take preferred by anthropologists. Instead, they skillfully used editing to lead viewers through an event, ultimately privileging a cinematic experience over an anthropological one. Flaherty was certainly far more concerned with ma intaining the effect that spectators were seeing an event in its entirety on screen. His characteristic use of the long take that extended the duration of the image onscreen was designed c choice that Andr é Bazin to classical Hollywood narrative style, both Nanook and The Hunters prompt viewers to participate in the event onscreen by making mean ing from one shot to the next, a way of seeing that is purely cinematic. The kind of seeing Marshall constructs in the opening sequence of The Hunters is a case n life in the first few moments of the film: here a branch and a bird, there a human being and a giraffe. Moving between shots of disparate images, Marshall prompts viewers to find relationships between them. We might notice consistencies of color scheme (the dusty beiges an d browns of the desert) or content (each shot records life in motion). We may also track repetitions, like the multiple shots of winged creatures or the marked shift between short takes of animals and the longer takes of human beings. Looking for patterns between individual shots is an active interpretive process that requires a highly attentive spectator; the editing of this introductory sequence establishes 134 Significantly, the re is not one point of view shot in this nearly four - minute sequence. Instead, we are asked simply to look perceptual space. The Kalahari emerges as a chain of images, some of which can easily be ident onscreen, we watch them slowly walk toward the camera and then leave the frame before the film gives us another image to decipher: a white moth fluttering close to the hard, dry ground. This moment could easily have been an opportunity to align the viewer with a human gaze. Inserting a close - dramatically changed the way viewers read that image and would prompt them to understand n men onscreen and to read the desert landscape along with them. Without film encourages us to regard the hunters the same way we regard the animals in Kalahari as forms of life that will always remain distant and in some way, unknowable to outsiders. The final shot of the seq uence only reinforces this sense of estrangement. Immediately / - up, scanning the distant horizon. Significantly, this first close - up of a human face is not followed by an image but by a non - diegetic title screen, denying the viewer any possibility of experiencing the perceptual moments of The Hunters establishes the aesthetic sensibility and na rrative structure particular to 135 things through the impersonal gaze o f the camera, an apparatus that the film positions as unobtrusive, omnipresent, and thoroughly objective. Implicit in this supposed neutrality, of course, is the notion that the camera objectifies the human subjects of the film, rendering them two - dimensi onal objects indistinguishable from the other forms of life in the desert that the camera records. Flattening the Kalahari into a series of images, the film prompts spectators to assume the ideal anthropological perspective that Bronislaw Malinowski imagin - Trobriand Islanders in his 1929 ethnography The Sexual Lives of Savages . Viewers are prompted to decipher patterns of human behavior onscreen without the messy contradictions and conundrums of day - to - day life in the field. The success of this effect relies on obscuring what is outside the frame. While viewers may see four men walking through a vast desert landscape, what they do not see is a young John Marshall filming while perched high in a baoba b tree to obtain the necessary distance to capture that shot. The Hunters cans out of Kalahari unsullied by the waste of an industrialized world, actively represses the fact that by 1952, neither the Kalahari nor the people who lived there were prehistoric. Histo rian Robert the early twentieth century (21 - 22) . By the time the M the 136 k on their farms to the Herero refugees from the German - Herero n waterholes for their history him as a young, adventurous teenager. Despite his best efforts, The Hunters wrestles with its own formal constraints in moments where actors ever so briefly glance at the camera, subtly attesting Despite the academic reception and classification of his films, Marshall claimed that he never considered himself an ethnographic filmmaker. He contrasts his attitude toward his fil fact, he claims that his father was never pleased with The Hunters precisely because of its epic narrative frame (36). Marshall, on the other hand, seemed to con sider his films simply documentaries that transcended their anthropological pretensions. In a 2003 interview, he people seem to think that I make ethnographic fi lms. I have no real idea what that is. What I shoot [in Nyae Nyae] is documentary and it is just exactly the same as I shoot here, except, I be a response to the fact that most documentary films classified as enjoy white privilege and are often the subject of anthropological study. Marshall may have made a name for himself with a film about indigenous subjects, but his career extends beyond the scope of traditionally ethnographic filmmaking projects. 137 Upon returning to the U.S., Marshall quickly turned the cinematic language he honed in the Kalahari on of direct cinema that sought to capture the real world as it unfolded in front of the camera without the didactic intrusion of voice - over narration. Over the course of his fam varying distances using a tripod to a more holistic practice of using a hand - held camera and filming events in their entirety. Marshall called the footage he procured using this method n arguments anthropologist s would later make for what characteristics qualify a documentary as - held belief that filming reality was possible informed his entire career as a filmmaker. He was particularly drawn to investigations of powerful cultur al institutions and made films explicitly intended to be shown in classrooms and community service - learning projects. Marshall became an important figure in America direct cinema, co - directing Titticut Follies (1967) with Frederick Wiseman before making th e Pittsburgh Police Series (1971 - 1973), 17 films that were used to illicit discussion about the role of the police in communities in the wake of Civil Rights Era violence. 40 Harnessing what he considered to be the all - seeing eye of came a way to enact his politics by revealing the flawed ideologies at the heart of American institutions through the film record. The filmmaker later wrote about the potential of filmmaking as a tool for advocacy and change. For him, the power of document ary 40 According to Jack Ellis and Betsey McLane, after disputes over editing Titticut Follies - directing credit was removed from the film (232). Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz write that he was later credited as cinematographer on that film (44). 138 sed people. documentary filmmaking and its quest to capture truth on film. Although he became famous for a narrative documentary film that closely mirrored the rhetorical structu re that critics so admired in made films that very self - consciously critiqued their own representational practices. 41 His 1980 film N!ai, Story of a !Kung Woman , for instance, is highly reflexive about the experience of reality that film constructs and his 2002 series A Kalahari Family acts of filming and editing his fifty - ms, n people who are the recurring subjects of his films watching and interpreting footage of themselves . In her afterward to The Harmless People , Elizabeth Marshall describe s one such occasion in 1972, when John screened his film Bitter Melons (1971), made from footage recorded in 1955, n people from / ousted from their land and living in poverty: John set up his screen in the veld to show the film to Gai who sat on his heels in the less what to expect and sat on his heels beside him. The film started. It shows how all the 41 Interestingly, Bill Nichols regards Titticut Follies as a powerful example of the potential of documentary filmmaking in his book Ideology and Image (1981) , the same text in which he uses The Hunters as an example of the ideological problems a t the heart of the ethnographic filmmaking project. He makes no mention of John 139 Tsechewe again, young and beautiful, and little Nhwakewe, and all the other pe ople living together in the old times. There was Gai himself, with his fine healthy body. There was Ukwane singing the old songs. Taken off guard, Gai was overcome. He caught while the film ran. (267 - 268) This second - studied, wrote about, travelled with and advocated for privileges the film image itself as a site of powerful intercultural ex change. formulation, it is not the poverty and illness plaguing Gai and his family that prompts his emotional response, but the images of his n people by have simply been eradicated and forgotten. This logic is strikingly similar to early - twentieth - practices consider the image to be a kind of artifact and the recorded event on film to contain in pa rticular, the film image creates the occasion for communal grieving over the past and has the potential to strengthen a community over a shared experience of mourning. John Marshall certainly found the notion that filmmaking could function as community - building appealing and consciously set out to use film as a tool for social justice. None of his films, however, can be read purely as image archives that contain the essence of the Ju / 140 the second half of the twentieth century. What they can show us is the evolution of a specifically filmmaker who grew up alongside his film s and consciously used his camera to intercede in a rapidly changing political landscape between 1950 and 2000 in Southern Africa and the United States. 141 VISUAL TROUBLE as an almost quaint trips turned museum - sponsored studies had all the elements of an earlier mode of exploratory travel establ ished in the nineteenth century: t he convoy of vehicles carrying drums of water and supplies and perpetually getting stuck in the mud; co oks, mechanics, and translators; the endless navigation of bureaucratic to enter territory; the exchange of gifts of tobacco David Livingstone or British explorer Henry Morgan Stanley would have recognized their experience of travel in Africa, as would later travelers like modernist writer and big - game hunter Ernest Hemmi ngway or the adventure filmmakers Martin and Osa Johnson. While their good intentions and American liberal politics make them more likable characters than some of their predecessors, the logic claim to have d iscovered in the desert is humanity by recording their culture. th of the violent paternalism inscribed in the gaze. In response to the v iolen ce inscribed in the visual discourse of many late - twentieth - century w riters, filmmakers, and looked for other ways to represent their cultural identity, history, and experience. The next chapter examines these efforts to shift attention away from the troubling visuality of ethnographic 142 representation of culture. 143 CHAPTER 3: LISTENING TO NATIVES SPEAK: THE SHIFT FROM VISION TO VOICE In his 1 955 meditative travelogue Tristes Tropiques , Claude Lévi - Strauss mourned the real Today the savages of the Amazonian forests are caught, like game - birds, in the trap o f communicates with another, the less likely they are to be corrupted, one by the other; but one the other hand, the less likely it is, in such conditions, that the emissaries of these cultures will be able to seize the richness and significance of their diversity. The alternative is inescapable: either I am a traveler in ancient times, and faced with a prodigious spectacle which would be almost entirely unintelligible to me and might, indeed, provoke me to mockery and disgust; or I am a traveler of our own day, hastening in search of a vanished reality. (42 - 45) Tracing the contours of a dilemma that troubled anthropologists throughout the twentieth century, L é vi - Strauss se t The promise of discovering and studying primitive human ancestors that had driven the s a visual project thoroughly entrenched in the ideologies of what L é vi - - modal examination of so - pr oject was the rigorous examination of the ideologies that made such methods of observation 144 and analysis possible. Anthropologists turned a critical eye toward their own discipline, its historical imbrication with colonialism and the ideological underpinnin gs of ethnographic authority. Film scholar Bi ll Nichols set out to re - evaluate the documentary claim to realism, hey really . The widely - hel d belief that absolute truths about the self could be found through the observation of others was rapidly being dismantled. Central to this wholesale critique of ethnographic authority were the voices of people 1950 peoples long spoken for by Western ethnographers, administrators, and missionaries began to speak and act more powerfully for themselves on a global stage [and] it was increasingly hard to keep them in - had not expressed themselves or attempted to intervene in ethnographic discourse before these years. Whether it was due to the changed intellectual climate that opened up publishing and exhibition venues for self - to Western discourse and institutions created by the events of the early twentieth century is unclear. What is clear is that the early 1 rejected those acts of seeing, seeking instead to locate, recuperate, circulate, and listen to Further, many of those voices actively sought to upend the authoritative visuality of the ethnographic gaze and reveal the ideological seams that naturalized those looking practices. 145 of marginalized Others. 42 This task required changing both the texts they analyzed and the theoretical vocabularies they brought to bear on those deconstruction of Levi - analytical tools to dise ntangle themselves from problematic disciplinary histories and methodologies. 43 In these years, scholars working in a range of fields readily acknowledged the violent inheritance of colonialism embedded in a history epitomiz ed by the visual archive of ethnographic portraiture, photography , and film. Representations of indigenous people by Western travelers, explorers, and scientists were clearly inscribed by the global politics that had produced those encounters and imbued the m with meaning, but representations by indigenous people still offered the promise of accessing an In this chapter, I argue that late twentieth - century ethnogr aphic representation, particularly in its manifestations across anthropology, literary travel writing, and documentary film, shifted from a discourse about vision to a discourse about voice. The preoccupation with voice was produced by two interrelated phe nomena that transformed textual analysis in the U.S. - colonization and knowledge was prod 42 from isolated to literary criticism. As I argue throughout this chapter, anthropology and documentary film registered a similar shift in subject and grappled w ith same ideological questions about authority. 43 Jacques Derrida made these arguments in his book Of Grammatology which was first published in 1967, but was not translated into English and published in the United States until 1976. Derrida first advanced his argument against the structuralism of Claude L é vi - After the New Criticism , Fran k Lentricchia gives a thorough account of these events (160 - 163). 146 post - structuralism, post - modernism, and post - colonialism, that resulted from that historical context. Central to both of these political and epistemic shifts were the voices of op pressed subjects, those people who historically had been spoken about and spoken for , but had not been considered speaking subjects. Although each of these shifts attended to questions of voice in the politics of representing others, they addressed this problem in different, and sometimes contradictory, ways. Protest colonized and marginalized people access to political agency. Post - structuralist criticism, on the Grammatology ices of oppressed people, post - structuralism and post - colonialism shifted the object of critical attention toward deconstructing the authority of Western representations of difference. As a reading practice, deconstruction initially sought to uncover the v oice of the author who speaks for and authorizes the experiences of others, rather than to recover the supposedly authentic voices of marginalized authors themselves. the pervasiveness and scope of this critical turn. In the voice - over to her 1984 film Reassemblage , avant - garde documentary filmmaker and theorist Trinh T. Minh - a phrase that announces both a new critical stance and a new procedure for ethnographic representation. Just one year essay of the same name, advanci ng the controversial argument that there is no position from 147 which the voices of those subjects historically represented by white, male authors can be heard. Turning post - author 44 If the subaltern subject had once articulated a point of view incomprehensible to the West, Spivak claimed , that voice could not be recuperated by the very discourse that had excised it from an official historical narrative. Both of these theorists inhabit historically marginalized identities, particularly in relation to the institutionalized production of k nowledge, but what unites their arguments is a deep concern with locating and listening to those voices that have been suppressed or erased in the Western traditions of textual representation. By problematizing the analytical vocabularies traditionally bro ught to bear on those texts, Trinh and Spivak both attempted to think differently Significantly, the texts they produced in this moment transformed their respective fie lds. Taken Reassemblage (1982), Naked Spaces Living is Round (1985), and Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989), as well as her book Woman, Native, Other s visual conventions and radical critique of post - sparked a debate within the field over the methods and goals of post - colonial scholarship. If in our current moment, both Trinh and Spivak remain crucial voices in their fields, it is because their theoretical interventions were central to the transformations in late - twentieth century scholarship i n the humanities and social sciences. The ideological and deconstructive reading 44 On Grammatology , a book which she translated and wrote a len gthy introduction. 148 practices that scholars in many fields regularly employ today are the inheritance of that transformation. In what follows, I close read three texts that exemplify the discurs ive turn toward native voice. As in previous chapters, I read comparatively between three modes of ethnographic representation: an anthropological text, a literary travelogue, and an ethnographic documentary. The texts I have chosen share some key characte ristics: they were each produced by women who inhabit marginalized identities with varying access to power; they all self - consciously address the ethical implications of representing the voices of so - crucially, they Individually, they offer very different solutions to the problems of speaking for and speaking about native others circumscribed by their intended audiences, fields, and mod e of address. Read not complete transformation, of ethnographic knowledge. Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Ku ng Woman - gatherer tribe now ethnographic genre: the life were manifested in the life of a single ind ividual (24 - 26). of favor as it was considered a literary practice incommensurate with the positivistic goals of the hist 14 9 Shostak places herself firmly within this Western, feminist context, claiming that she was drawn to the project by the possibility of learning about a universal interpreting tape - ervention from Shostak herself. The stories Nisa tells are intimate, full of bawdy humor and details about her sexual liaisons, and often tragic. Arranged in chronological order from her childhood memories to her old age, Shostak attempts to give readers under Reassemblage is an avant - garde ethnographic docume ntary conventions. Although she shot the footage for Reassemblage on location while conducting ethnographic fieldwork in West Africa in 1981, the film she produced can har dly be described as a traditional ethnographic documentary. Through a radical disjuncture of sound and image, Trinh representational project. As a Vietnamese woman working and teaching at an elite American university, Trinh has a complex relationship to the production of ethnographic knowledge and the power that book suggests, she is also regarded as an important artist and intellectual at the center of post - 150 colonial and feminist theory in the U.S. academy. More than in her other films, in Reassemblage Trinh explicitly addresses the complexities of her relationship to anthropologic lf - In contrast to the cross - intended for a particular audience of ethnographic documentarians, a vant - garde filmmakers, and - representing indigenous people on film. J A Small Place (1988) takes a very different approach to representing native voice. In her sardonic rewriting of the tourist travelogue, Kincaid speaks as a native of Antigua, disrupting the conventions that have circumscribed the genre to of view of her home country. Conventionally, travelogue writing speaks about the silent and of the landscape rather than as dyna other hand, employs direct address to speak to her reader who is uncomfortably positioned as a white tourist. Angrily interrogating the colonial history and politics of late - capitalism that deny her agency in a discourse of leisure, tourism, and travel, Kincaid demands that her readers acknowledge the politics inscribed in the ethnographic looking she describes. If Shostak attempts to speak with her native subject and Trinh speaks nearby natives, Ja maica Kincaid speaks as a native, occupying a point of view coveted by anthropologists, 151 filmmakers, and travel writers for the majority of the twentieth century. That she uses the travelogue to make her critique of tourism poses a particular set of rhetori cal problems that she self - consciously addresses. Writing within a literary form circumscribed by a long history of formulation (Lorde 110 - 113) ethnographic gaze by the travelogue take on a role as speaking subject within the genre? If the travelogue, by its very mode o f address, establishes a set of reader - writer relation ships that travelogue is an attempt to answer those questions. The violent collapse of structures of power a politically and epistemologically, called for new reading practices and forms of critique. The response to a long and troubl ing visual history and the violence inscribed in what is now called subject positions and address different audiences. Reading their work together is my attempt t o and to re - examine the stakes of that debate. 152 Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman opens with a cur ious epigraph tell you what it there. Then, like the others that have fallen out onto the sand, I will finish with it, and the wind wi ll take it away. obliquely by first asking them to decipher what seems to be an opaque metaphor for storytelling. Here, stories are akin to artifacts, objects It seems clear why this poetic description of storytelling would appeal to an anthropologist. Not only does Nisa herself conceptualize stories as objects to be gathered, picked up, and analyzed, a metaphor any ethnographer could easily recognize as a descript ion of fieldwork, but the relationship between storyteller and listener she delineates here closely resembles that between an anthropologi a role that Nisa seems happy to play. Even further, Nisa envisions storytelling here as a highly ritualistic activity more appearance of poetry only reinforces this effect. After all, poetry is a performative genre. the carefully selected and stylized language of poetry makes her words seem profound, more like an incantation than a casual observation. 153 There are , however, readings that do not paint such a benign image of anthropologis ts in the field. Nisa could just as easily be talking about the cyclical nature of her relationships with the many anthropologists that she met over her lifetime, outsiders who regularly gave her gifts and sometimes paid her in cash for telling stories. By the time she met Shostak in 1971, she had worked with various anthropologists from the same long - 45 In the introduction to her book, Shostak makes it plain that she chose to work with Nisa because of her exceptional ability to tell a compelling story. Her narratives covered a range of life experi drama , and were organized c hronologically with a beginning, middle, and end (7, 40). While Shostak writes that she discussed the requirements of the interviews with all the women she interviewed, it seems clear that Nisa had already honed her craft by telling stories to the anthropo logists who she had worked with in the past and was well aware of the rhetorical and economic structures in which she was operating. 46 retelling of her history as a series of confessions, a critique that calls into question the veracity, member of the hunter - 45 Shostak notes she and her husband, anthropologist Melvin Konner, joined the long - term research expedition initiated in 1963 by Harvard anthropologists Irven DeVore and Richard Lee in 1969, as the project was close to its end. Together, they lived in the Dobe area of northwester n Botswana for 20 months. 46 In his 1988 book Predicament of Culture , James Clifford considered Nisa a noteworthy example of what he called - discu (41 - 43). 154 47 In the Foucauldian framework in which Crapanzano explicitly contextualizes his critique, the confession carries a specific set of self - policing and self - fashioning concerns. How, the anthropologist wonders, might the generic conventions of such a her listener with the details about her sexuality that made her narrative so fascinating for Shostak What seems to trouble Crapanzano is the notio could quite possibly be false. Whether her stories were contorted by the imposition of Western narrative conventions or she embellished them to satisfy the expectations she perceived of her audience, he suggests th suspect. Shostak admits that she worried about the same thing when she sat down to draft her conta perverse, regularly in her introduction Shostak explicitly states that Nisa should not be considered anthropological value that she wants to claim for her book relies on the notion that readers these concerns about her me 47 While Shostak refers to this term because the other terms associated with the same ethnic group have been or still are considered pejorative. 155 (355) . aith but read together their remarks point provocatively to the problem at ve, her book does not describes the experiences associated with womanhood, a category Shostak imagined as both heteronormative and universal. Complete with episode s of child birth and rearing, marriage, and history. The anthro pologist finds herself with the task of representing Nisa in both senses of the - reader. Both of these forms of representation carry political and ethical implicat ions. 1981 might have. What her text illustrates so vividly is the shift in anthropology toward locating ject. If Shostak set out to capture a more authentic version of culture told from an insider perspective, what she actually recorded is the uneasy relationship between her own authorizing voice and the voice of her informant. By presenting readers with a s writing shows us the omissions, excesses, and confusions that result from her attempt to 156 Shostak self - consciously addresses how her book inter venes methodologically in anthropological studies of the Ju/hoansi and how it contributes to that archive. In her introduction, she describes what she tried to accomplish: l I knew, except in the most general terms, what these events really meant to the !Kung. I could see, for example, how much they relied on each other and how closely they sat together, but I did not understand how they felt about their relationships and th eir lives. I needed information that could not be observed; I needed the !Kung to start speaking for themselves. (6 - 7) In just a few lines, she identifies the epistemological problems with simp her shorthand for the singula r methodology of ethnographic fieldwork, participant - observation. For her, relying purely on what information she can glean from visual observation experiences. In the no menclature that has become so typical of discourse about marginalized voices, she proposes that that when previously silenced subjects the problems of misapprehending culture can be resolved. m may appear somewhat naïve and cliché, but the urgency with which she addresses her reader here reveals something of the intellectual climate in anthropology in 1981. In a moment in which an entire generation of anthropologists had become deeply invested offered the possibility of giving indigenous people agency over the representation of their individual identities and cultural experiences. According to the anthropologist, her boo k was produced through the mutually - beneficial, collaborative relationship she developed with her 157 and seemed to derive considerable pleasure from the entire pr complete history of her life. What she proposes in her introduction is no less than a new method fieldwork; as anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski put it, the ethnographer should al ways be grasp 22). Crucially, though, this method will capture She also considers her work an intervention in the anthropological archive on the Ju/hoansi. After reading ethnographies of the Ju/hoansi and speaking with anthropologists who had recently returned from the Kalahari before embarking on her own expedition, she writes that she was left with the impression that their observa Shostak was apparently not the only anthropologist to feel this way. Enough life histories were published in the early 1 - emergence of the genre a trend (953). Aware of the rhetorical trappings of ethnographic writing, Shostak attempts to come up with another way to represent culture. If the questions Shostak ( questions that she was inspired to ask by could not be answered by frames her project as filling in the holes in the archive by creating th e conditions for a new voice to speak. 158 Accomplishing this task turned out to be more difficult than Shostak originally anticipated. After confronting the issues with the content of her tape - recorded interviews, she faced the ethical dilemma of representin problem created by the rhetorical disjunction at the heart of the book that she described this way: my work, certainly, and she had given what could fairly be called informed consent to it; but it was her Nisa person has implications that extend far beyond book contracts and royalties. It is safe to say that the sake of the book lived in abject poverty, subject to the relocation plans of the Botswana government that brought wage 48 in a political sense, to a larger pu blic carried a set of very real, moral responsibilities. Re - interp reted, marking her as the authorizing voice of the text. Still, reconciling the two voices of the text is a formidable challenge, both for Shostak seems to draw a clear line between form and content, a division of labor that at first seems fairly obvious since Shostak edited the narratives that Nisa provided. Upon closer examination though, aintain. Shostak does 48 Shostak does address this issue in her epilogue, indicating that she set aside money for Nisa and donated part of hropologists who had worked with land rights and economic development (351). Nisa herself recognized the money to be gained from selling the book. According to her 159 how she chose her as an informant, and how their relationship developed over time. She tells the story of her own entrance to the fie ld (a staple of ethnographic writing) and her struggles to learn a Khoisan language and to l ive in the Bush. Nor does Nisa play solely a storytelling function in rec order, telling stories spontaneously and at random. She arranged her stories chronologically and with a beginning, middle, and end. She rewound the tape from the previous interview, listened to what was recorded, and decided what changes should be made and what other information should be included. 49 To claim that Nisa simply told stories and that Shostak It is precisely this issue of narrative authority at the foundation of her project that Shostak attempts to mitigate in the opening pages of her book. The first words readers find following the title page and the table of contents, after all, is the prose poem epigraph that the anthropologist at ory associations attributed to what very well have been, for Nisa at least, an everyday, idiomatic phrase make even this very first encounter w epony mous subject also an encounter with the anthropologist herself. What comes next, however, seems to be language transcribed directly Then I felt so her baby for the first time, before Shostak picks up the narrative by contextu 49 Shostak writes that Nisa once stopped mid - 160 fifty years of age, living in a remote corner of Botswana, on the northern fringe of the Kalahari s moment as a point of departure from which to It makes sense that Shostak life history w ith a story about birth. However, the narrative tha t Nisa tells is not the story of her own birth but her birth story, an account of her experience giving birth, and like many of the stories that she tells, it is a traumatic isa recounts that when she began to feel the first pangs of labor pain she set off into the bush to give birth alone, away from camp. After giving birth, she stares at her crying newborn infant, not knowing (2). She remembers leaving her baby in the Bush, planning to return with coals to make a fire to make a fire to warm them both, but when she returns to the village her husband scolds her for abandoning the baby and sends his grandmother, the only other woman in his family, to help retrieve the child. It would be hard to argue that Shostak does not make some eff ort to hand over narrative textual reproduction of her voice. With her culturally - disorienting experience for readers who would need cultural context in order to understand the 161 story that Nisa tells. Why else would she have provided no less than 34 pages of clarification speech? Yet, instead of introducing her subject to reader she makes the choice to place The story that Nisa tells, though, is troubling. Birth s tories are perhaps the most traumatic leaving her newborn child defenseless on the ground, an action that seems to resist the universal womanhood, at least through something like maternal instinct, but she even goes so far as to question her relationship to the infant she has just borne in her narrative. Certainly, the physical trauma of labor certainly explains away her disorie ntation; it is not uncommon for women to experience this kind of de - familiarization after giving birth. Still, I cannot help but read her birth story as an allegory for the authorial confusion Nisa gives birth to a child but cannot bring her back to the village without the help of an older, wiser woman. Even if Nisa produced the individual stories that make up the majority of the text, the story suggests that she still needs Shostak to translate , transcribe, and arrange them into a life history comprehensible to a Western reader. In its implication that Nisa and Shostak rely on each other to produce the text, this narrative frames the rest of the stories that both the anthropologist and her sub ject tell. Organizationally, it is an anomaly; the remaining stories are introduced by Shostak and story sets up readers to accept the relationship between the storyteller and her interlocutor as 162 Argonauts of the Western Pacific , an ethnography generally considered by anthropologists as an Ur - text. Ultimately, this introductory narrative tells us, Nisa needs Shostak to bring her story out of the local and into the global. Exactly why Nisa would need to tell Western readers her life story and how she would benefit fr om that speech act is far less clear. with the anthropological facts she gives us, thereby confirming the accuracy of her interpretation of th e Ju/hoansi. Nisa describes her childhood trauma of being weaned from nursing in detail, a story that Shostak frames as a typical experience in her intr Nisa tells a lengthy story about rejecting several men she was p artnered with as a young girl. She leaves her first husband because of his sexual liaisons with another woman and leaves her second husband because his back is covered with burn scars , which disgusts her. On both occasions, she returns to her family and is accepted back with little debate. If the notion of girl s, and is usually interpreted at being directed at marriage itself, rather than at a specific - husbands, we learn, does not mean that she is bunking the heteronormative system, for instance, or that she is a lesbian. By 163 labeli Shostak confirms her own reading of these events and forecloses other interpretive possibil ities. Based on this rhetorical pattern, Nisa does not simply speak directly to readers. Rather, her stories are carefully mediated, transformed from personal experiences to examples that thropologist claims that what cultural customs are manifested at the level of the individual. Rhetorically at least, the authentic native voice that Shostak set out to record is thoroughly pacified, rendered legible and predictable by the authorizing voice of the fieldworker herself. There are, however, moments that break this pattern. At certain points in the text, Shostak hoansi. Shostak reports that s, she cites findings from the Marshall family expeditions lovers, or that people only learned about it recently from the blacks, they are deceiving you. They are giving you lies and are trying to fool you with their cleverness. But I, I am affairs on e married person making love to another not her husband is something that 164 there ar e as many as my fingers and toes. (271) Directly confronting the anthropologist about the issue, Nisa tells Shostak that what she has - special relationship to claim that she has no reason to lie. Having affairs is not something new to 50 s no exception. By not commenting on this discrepancy, Shostak leaves readers to interpret the conflict established herself as the voice of authority in the text, it is d as anything other than an exception to a cultural norm. Still, th e tension between their views on oan culture, leaves an uncomfortable ellipsis in the text. If can tell the difference between true and false stories now? How can we know that Shostak can tell face value? 50 the anthropological argument that the behavior was the re sult of influence from Herero and Tswana settlements 165 While this relatively small contradiction begins to undermine the easy authority of center of the book. Many of the stories that Nisa tells are violen t, but one of the most troubling born her mother told her to bring her a digging stick so she could quickly bury the baby before he cried. Even though Nisa p to wh Shostak makes it clear that she does not believe this story. In the introduction, she much of what she had told me ter just and puts Nisa to the test, asking her to repeat the story more slowly (32). not told about this event after the fact but witnessed it herself. Clearly distressed about what s he perceives to be the impossibility of this version of events, the anthropologist assures her readers created to help her psychologically cope with the jealousy she experienced with the birth of her first sibling or her mother told her daughter that she would kill the baby without ever seriously 166 intending to carry out the act to convince her to give up nursing, a conflict that had reached a dramatic climax by the end of her pregnancy (32). In either case, Shostak acknowledges that although Nisa believed the story to be true, she is certain that it is not. Significantly, the closest Shostak comes to resolving this narrative tension is to recognize that she will n accepted it as something I might not understand for awhile. The final interpreta tion of this story and of some of the others will probably remain subject to speculation. I came to see that as one etimes it is impossible to completely understand what say things that white American women from Harvard do not want to hear. The issue of infanticide was a lready a vexed topic in Shostak was writing her book. Lorna Marshall, another female anthropologist affiliated with about the practice. 51 As I mentioned in the previous chapter, in her first book about the - depth r (166). For both of these anthropologists, infanticide is a Western cultural taboo that lies at the very limits of reflects a larger absence within the anthropologi cal archive on the Ju/hoansi. 51 A nthropologist Lila Abu - book ethnography comprised books written by semi - (475). also links her to Lorna Marshall, a self - taught anthropologist whose work I read as a struggle for authority in Chapter Two. 167 history, infanticide becomes the most obvious manifestation of the major anthropological ling the truth about her history or is she telling only if she rec ounts her true memory of her life experiences . Apparently for Shostak, recording asks the proper questions and the native informant simply answers them. Albei t sometimes to answer questions, but based on the fantasy underwriting this anthropological scenario, it would never occur to informants to fabricate answers or to tell stories based on the expectation s of their audience because such a strategy would mean that the native subject is rhetorically savvy enough to be an active producer of cultural information rather than a passive representative of culture. In short, to inhabit the role of storyteller woul d mean assuming control of a cultural narrative and participating in a This concern may explain why Shostak goes to some effort in her epilogue to describe hed in a book and that she understood that the book could mean financial gain: ot only does Nisa comprehend how book sales could generate income, she also understands that she has to 168 rely on Shostak to get her share of the proceeds. She mentions her desire for a cow, a detail that Return to Nis a (2000) in which the anthropologist reminds readers of her promise and reassures them that Nisa bought five pregnant cows with the money Shostak sent her ( Return 25). Even while this story makes it clear that Nisa is a willing subject and collaborator in Shostak as both interlocutor and benefactor. Without the anthropologist, it seems that Nisa would never have access to the livestock that can offer her a more sustainable way of life in modern Botswana. y be, experiences. The paternalism that we now recognize so let the nati ve undermines the second - it illustrates the fail ure of well - meaning liberalism and white, middle - class feminism to speak for all women. Both anthropologists propose that womanhood is a universal experience with the potential to transcend the politics of national, racial, and socio - economic status. Altho ugh their omes mired in the unintended desirable. 169 SPEAKING NEARBY NATIVES Tri nh T. Min - Reassemblage begins and ends exclusively with sound. The medias res, the signature hand drums and rattles of Senegalese Jola music, along with the sounds of people conversing, plays for just over forty seconds before viewers get their first glimpse of Senegal and the people who live there. As the first image appears, the music abruptly cuts off and a disjointed sequence of shots is projected in silence: a man sharpens a knife; a small child looks offscreen; an old man smokes his pipe and glances at something we cannot see outside the - two billion peop to clarify the first minute and a half of the film. Images proliferate, now in rapid succession: a bushfire burns; women and children walk away from the camera in one shot an d then toward the - cited statement writes over the longest - take in the sequence of a woman 1895 chronophotographs of West African people in motion, particularly h images that ar e early ancestors of the ethnographic documentary. Perhaps it goes without saying that solely listening to a film for almost a minute can be a disconcerting experience. At the very least, it is a highly unusual one given that film is an audiovisual medium and that spectators tend to privilege the image track. Clearly, nothing about Reassemblage is designed to make audiences comfortable. In fact, audiences at early screenings were so uneasy with the film that they fiercely debated its merit, questioning whe ther the film 170 qualified as ethnographic documentary at all (Penley and Ross 87). In a 1990 issue of Visual Anthropology Review Moore reported that watching Reassemblage produced feel (70). - informed attack upon anthropology, wrapping herself in the banner of privilege by virtue of her sex and 73). Anthropologis ts were still bristling a year later, when Jay Ruby dismissed - critici . 52 Certainly like many avant - garde and video art films Trinh disentangles sound from image to defamiliarize the cinematic experience, a process that be uncomfortable but is designed to force viewers to become activ e participants in creating a fieldwork and documentary are central to her critique of both practices. That visual anthropologists found her work not only disconce rting but threatening testifies to the effectiveness of those strategies. closing moments, critical readings of Reassemblage i numerous jump cuts, trick shots in which bodies seem to disappear and reappear, canted angles, and repeated close - ups that fragment the bodies onscreen, Trinh gives spectators a radically 52 It s have recently become a major conce An Anthropo logical and Documentary Dilemma , explicitly references her work. See Visual Anthropology Review . 7(2): 1991. 50 - 67. Print. 171 disjointed view of Senegal. Scholarly discourse on the film, however, goes a step further, insisting that Reassemblage is above all else a meditation on the ethnographic gaze. Stephen A. Zacks, for instance, characterizes the film as between different dis - 125). Adrienne McCormick considers all of more visible how the filmic apparatus works to produce less visible the contents of documentary films that are usually positioned she refers to as the is what the teleology of feminist documentary. It is impossible to deny that Reassemblage rewrites the visual conventions of ethnographic documentary, but the way the film plays with sound is crucial to understanding both its intervention in ethnographic filmmaking practice and its contribution to critical theory. ice - Reassemblage is still remembered as the film that a concept that has been transformative for scholars working in many fields across the humanities and the social sciences. Rather than explain the image onscreen, Trinh uses voice - over to comment upon her what they see, a strategy that has not lost its potential to open up new ways of thinking about documentary filmmaking practice. Even further, speaking from multiple points of view disrupts audience expectations of the authority ty pically assumed by a single, expert narrator of the 172 - of - cut or the close - up, have lost their ability to shock audiences with their novelty and remain firmly fixed within the cinematic grammar of American avant - Her use of sound, on the other hand, remains as relevant today as it did when the film was released. - stablishes her unique take on the narrational style most associated with ethnographic documentary. An intertitle on a black screen identifies that the fil , but other than those bare details of date and location, viewers are left to decipher the sounds and images that follow without much guidance. We may not be certain, for instance, what kind of music we are hearing or what the function of that music might be. Is it celebratory and if so, what is the occasion? Does the music accompany a ritual of some kind? Once images appear on screen, viewers expect voice - over narration to explain the bodies onscreen. What is the man carving? What tools is he using and why? Instead, the very first words that Trinh utters offers commentary o - 105). Here, voice - ion to the global, rather than the local. Certainly, the effects of globalization call into question the very existence of a , for if the man onscreen is part of a community that is defined by outsiders and defines itself using terms imposed by outsiders, how can he still be consi dered an , isolated from the reach of modern influence? Far from an obtuse abstraction, Trinh first uses of voice - over to make a straightforward observation about the rapid spread an d violent effects of the hierarchical ideology of 173 a notion closely linked to the history of colonialism and its imbrication with early - twentieth - century anthropology. At that time, anthropology still operated on the premise images of folk rituals and processes based on the belief that they could salvage the last vestiges Henrietta Moore the traditional function of such images by offe ring a disjointed, incomplete view of the process itself and withholding an image of the completed object, a tactic she explicitly described in a 1985 interview with film scholars Constance Penley and Andrew Ross: ure to an ending point. The objects and subjects filmed are purposeless; they are not governed by any single rationale. One example: the shot of the man carving wood is not included in the film to show what kind of sculpture he is making (hence the absence of information on the end product of his work); it merely offers a view of a man carving, while a correspondence may be drawn between his arm movements and the rhythmic music on the sound track. (95) It is precisely what is not seen that rewrites this ima ge for Trinh, who at once invokes and then completed object, they are directed to find other sources of meaning, like the syncopation between movement and music or image and sound. Voice - over works similarly in this moment to force viewers away from the tendency to affix conventional meanings to this process sequence. While Trinh does not explain the carving that viewers see onscreen, she does reference a large r, more abstract process of globalization. 174 There is a strong association between the image and sound tracks here, but it is not one that audiences are used to making. Trinh does not describe what is seen in this moment as much as name a process that cannot be seen: how globalization is internalized and creates the very oice - over asks us to look away from the literal i mage and engage in a more metaphorical practice of looking for meaning. The very next statement Trinh makes in her voice - over becomes the mantra of the film. random, poetic utterance or a fragment of prescriptive speech, as some criticism implies. 53 e images onscreen, she tells us, her film will not contribute to a discourse of - lear what it means to resist speaking authoritatively about Others, but the alternative that Trinh identifies subjects? What forms of speech can pose viable alternati ves to the problem of paternalistically immediately in Reassemblage , set the stage for the sustained examination of subjectivity and authenticity that she undertakes in the remainder of the film. The search for a position from which to speak in relationship to other cultures is the 53 Reassemblage a performance art piece that had little relevance to ethnographic film and called her voice - over comm , - 67). 175 Reassemblage , E. Ann Kaplan has similarly destabilizing any not ion of a coherent site from which to accurately or scientifically represent other people and cultures: Reassemblage and following films led to a realization that it was not a matter of one subject interacting with one object, of know a unitary Other. For Trinh, to put it that way would be to mis - state the problem. objectivity. It has its own range of activity. (198 - 199) nor are the subjects of her ee cal challenge to what Bill Nichols has Representing 3). While many documentaries still relied on voice - over to assume a supposedly objective stance in relation to the people and events they recorded, Trinh used her voice - over to pose an alternative to this convention. published in a 1985 volume of Camera Obscura : A man attending a slide show on Africa turns to his wife and says with 176 Documentary because reality is organized into an explanation of itself Every single detail is to be recorded. The man on the screen smiles at us while the necklace he wea rs, the design of the cloth he puts on, the stool he sits on are objectively commented upon It has no eye it records on The omnipresent eye. Scratching my hair or washing my face become a very special act Watching her through the lens. I look at her becoming me becoming mine Entering into the only reality of signs where I myself am a sign (108) - over script appears to be poetry here, arranged typographically on the page into performance in the film. Reading the published versi on of this script, subt - over. Aurally, the difference between the various narratorial voices of the film is very subtle. Isolating this fragment of the sound track in print, however, r impersonates in the course of just a few minutes. This sequence begins with what seems like a fragment of a longer story. A man attends a slide show on Africa and afterwards confes 177 response to it. For those view variety: bare - chested women and loin - cloth clad men engaged in a vaguely - defined ritual dance . 54 rther, this story arrives - sentence becomes a deceptively simplistic commentary on the confession of taking voyeuristic pleasur more complex. Bare - chested women proliferate onscreen, sitting on a stoop, holding young children, and pulling water from a well. Close - ups of their breasts strangely fragment their bodies, drawing atte ntion to the preoccupations of the person behind the camera. When juxtaposed with these images, the story of the guilty voyeur comments not only on the history of As and these images were recorded and arranged by her. 54 locales were a popular entertainment in the nineteenth - century United States. For an extensive online archive of his slide shows and history, see http://www.burtonholmesarchive.com/ . 178 Suddenl - over introduces a new topic. A she announces, when it organizes reality into an explanation of itself. She continues to pursue this claim, describing a procedure familiar to anyone who has seen a convention al ethnographic scenario, Trinh demonstrates how a human subject b record images. Through an oblique referen Trinh refutes a concept that has been highly influential for many directors in the documentary tradition, shifting attention away from the camera itself and to the person behind the camera who records and organizes reality. Not only does the filmmaker change topics suddenly and without expl anation here, but perhaps even more abruptly, she also shifts her mode of address from the descriptive to the declarative. There is, after all, a logical thread connecting the story she has just told to her explanation of documentary. The narrative implies a critique of the history of ethnographic context of the ethnographic documentary. Shifting from storytelling to explaining, however, is particularly jarring for th e viewer, forcing them out of the relatively straightforward experience of narrative and into a theoretical discourse about film form. The image track in this moment od both suggest the process sequence so typical of ethnographic documentary and withhold the possibility of understanding that process. Repeated shots of a woman carrying a large basket on - handl ers conventionally associated 179 with nineteenth - century travelogues. Sound and image combine here to prompt viewers to think critically about how ideology is embedded in film form. As the images onscreen become obscured by dust, the voice - over changes co urse once again to comment on what we see. Instead of contextualizing, historicizing, or explaining the dust storm, Trinh quotes a child who tells a story about weathering the storm by lying on mat and outside observer of culture, the filmmaker presumably collected this fragment of a story from many conversations with the people who are the subjects of her film. Removed from any larger context and simply placed into the voice - over of the film, this brie f narrative hardly gives viewers anything close to a complete understanding of the event onscreen. Rather, this very short story suggests that the dust storm does not have meaning aside from the human experience of it. Although the voice we hear recounting this In the final shift in narrative voice in this excerpt, Trinh uses the ter ms of semiotics to self - seems to speak as though she were the woman she is filming, noting ironically that for the hing my hair or washing my face become a 55 In the very next line, however, she speaks from another point of view, now through the lens/ I look at he 55 - over is inflected by her accented English, atypical grammar and inflection. 180 moment articulate s in microcosm the larger project of Reassemblage , which Judith Mayne has quickly between multiple subject positions, Trinh imaginatively deconstructs the boundary that separates herself as filmmaker from the people she films. Here, she demonstrates perhaps most lm and to create a space in which to comment upon her own representational practices. If the multiple points of view that Trinh offers on the image track destabilizes any one e notion that there is any one voice that can speak about Senegal and the people who live there. Just as there is ests, speech acts are always situated from within an identity positon, whether it be the anthropologist or the native, and contextualized within a discursive framework. In her painstaking reading of Trin Kaplan discerns fou - over: an ironic - and a d iscourse that seeks to deconstruct the subject - object relation at the center of ethnographic - in this voice that Trinh teaches her viewer how to interpret the other three discourses. By weaving in and out of these speaking positions, Trinh performs a meta - commentary on the representative practices of ethnographic documentary. Ultimately, her voice - over is not about Senegal as much as it is about the impossibil ity of capturing the true Senegal through any 181 - over in Reassemblage An van. Dienderen , who collaborated with Trinh on her 2005 film Night Passage , has suggested writes: The universe of Trinh T. Minh - ha is inspired by a very precise conce pt of authorship that breaks away from Western, nineteenth - century romantic individualism. She thinks of the Authorship is understood as a site for an encounter with and an exploration of a film set, rather than an execution of a plan. (96) Night Passage specifically, her comments Reassemblage . tradition, an individual author a ims for clarity and concision, avoiding contradictions or articulate contradictory statements to create productive juxtapositions between discursive positions. No o ne subject - position is given authority over the representation of Senegal. Instead, meaning is found in the contrast between points of view. ethnographic fieldworker, but implicitly her subject position as a Vietnamese woman living and working in the U.S. also destabilizes the conventional subject - object relationship that - observer 182 tradit between the ethnographer and the natives he represents. As Kaplan suggests, Tr actual spectator of Reassemblage is not white and /or male, the film positions all viewers from this point of view, particularly in the way that Trinh plays upon the conventions of ethnographic become legible t o a viewer familiar with ethnographic documentary, at least to the extent that they recognize that the film is confounding these conventions. As ethnographic documentaries produce an ethnographic gaze that is both white and male, the audience familiar with those conventions takes on that subject position. - over so disruptive is the particular inflections of her voice itself. Filmmaker Bérénice Reynaud writes that Reassemblage connotations in the gra in ities that English and the image track of her film: Something slips in the relationship between image and voice; the narrator uses the - 183 documentary. (104) it imp particularly crucial moment, in the midst of her commentary about femal e nudity and the - over parallels the uncomfortable proliferation of breasts on screen. Similarly, her her own subject position and the white, male identity of the character in the story she tells who is titillated by the nudity he witnesses in a travel slide show. Designed consciously to avoid replicating the h istories of violence implicit in speaking point of view: that o f the ethnographer herself. The voice who speaks in her films is located somewhere alongside her subjects, not above or beyond them. It refracts multiple, sometimes contradictory, points of view. It is an embodied voice, particular in its pronunciation and intonation. While historically ethnographic filmmakers used the camera to examine the unfamiliar in order to comprehend difference, Trinh uses film to reverse this project. Instead of trying to understand culture, Reassemblage hensibility. Rather than perpetual outsiders, who can observe and listen to culture but can never understand what they see 184 or hear. An outsider can never access an only listen to a dissonant chorus of speech, trying to discern a pattern in the rising and falling cadence of their rhythms. 185 SPEAKING AS THE NATIVE The travelogue is a literary genre that imagines a reader for whom travel is a certainty, not a question. 1921 travelogue Sea and Sardinia opens with the proclamation propelled the writer out of an England he found dreary and provincial in search of the transformative experiences he imagined could be found in Europe and later in the Americas. In the first line of her 1937 travelogue Baghdad Sketches , intrepid English traveler Freya Stark l link Baghdad with Europe , bemoaning the travelers (1). Just as it never occurs to Stark to wonder if touri sts will eventually flood into Baghdad, bringing modernity and all its trappings with them, Lawrence never questions whether travelogue writers, tourism is simply a par t of modern experience. When the tourist goes to Italy or Iraq, both Lawrence and Stark seems to say, this is what they are likely to see. A Small Place , on the other hand, announces a f an inevitable experience but a hypothetical one. If the reader chooses to go to Antigua as a tourist, she suggests, they have also chosen to inhabit a particular point of view. Crucially, Kincaid directly addresses her reader in this sentence, positioning them as the hypothetical tourist - observer whose point of view she subjects to scrutiny a nd harsh critique in the remainder of the text. From this moment onward, the reader is addressed in the second - person singular 186 And what do readers see from t hat vantage point? From the safe distance of an airplane window seat, we look down at the island n hines and where the likely will not Travelling by taxi from airport to hotel, we repeatedly misinterpret the stra nge and incongruous sights along the way: all the taxis are brand - new, luxury cars driven that make terrible noises that we mistake for a public bathroom i s actually, Kincaid informs us, a school; we understand Kincaid remin ds us, the dilapidated buildings and corrupt government that cannot afford to repair - pleasure in sunning themselves there (13). Fixing h Kincaid suddenly shifts her tourist - Still standing, looking out the window, you see yourself lying on the beach, enjoying the amazing sun way, for they are people just like you). You see yourself eating some delicious, locally 187 happened to the contents of your lavatory when you flushed it. (13 - 14) In deceptively simple prose, Kincaid describes a very familiar imaginary process as an elaborate ritual of self - deception and rationalization. The tourist can only take pleasure in the experien ce of Antigua, she claims, if they project a fantasy of leisure and abundance onto the contradictory realities of island life. That there is no plumbing system in Antigua to prevent waste from being dumped into the ocean, for instance, cannot intrude upon To make her case, Kincaid elaborates a specific set of visual relationships that are crucial to conjuring Antigua as a si te of pleasure. By positioning readers from the first sentence as observers, the writer stages tourism itself as a primarily visual experience that begins and ends in the realm of imagination. Antigua is revealed to readers through a highly - controlled seri es of looks, from the aerial perspective of an airplane window to the artificial frame of the window in a hotel. From start to finish, the tourist examines a place already framed, quite literally in this case, by the infrastructure of leisure travel. Moreo ver, the tourist gaze that Kincaid simulates in these first pages follows a very particular trajectory from examination to introspection. As the reader - tourist goes sightseeing, they must observe a series of other people, ranging from taxi drivers to other - observer to make an associ ational shift inward and to project a version of self into an imaginatively framed landscape. Concluding this to readers that the final stage of a tourist point of view is to shift entirely into the realm of fiction. 188 pleasure from the beginning of this sequence is eventually suppressed entirely because, as Kincaid adamantly and repeatedly asserts, to maintain the illusion that sustains the very - reader looks out the wi a fictional version of the self. For a genre historically circumscribed b y realism, at least in terms than see the sights of Antigua, Kincaid asks readers to examine the unseen subject of the travelogue island life. Kincaid is not the first writer to subject travelogue writing to critique and revision. Modernist writers self - consciously took up the travelogue, a genre they associated both with nineteenth - century imperialism and with tedious, amateurish storytelling, as a literary tool to investigate a modern, post - war subjectivity and to quest ion realist empiricism. William Carlos A Voyage to Pagany (1928), for instance, borrows the form of the travelogue to investigate the psychological minutia of his principle character, an American physician who observes foreign others but cannot understand them. Vita Sackville - travelogue Passenger to Tehran Middle East as it is a highly stylized meditation on the failure of words to adequately convey images. In Jo urney Without Maps (1936), Graham Green writes about his travels through Liberia 189 as a means of exploring his own role within the British Empire and the often perplexing relations of dominance that such a subject position engenders . In fact, the travelogue that began this Sea and Sardinia wish for the dissolution of the self in the remote landscape of Sardinia. For each of these writers, the travelogue proved an extremely generative form for experimentation and innovation. critical revision of the travelogue is unique for two reasons. First, the subject position from which she makes that criti que opens up a fresh set of rhetorical possibilities for the genre. As a self - historically denied her the agency to authorize narrative. In stark contrast to the modernist writers who used the travelogue to comment on the psychic terrain of a system in which they were willing participants, Kincaid rejects the very possibility of tourist travel because as a addressing her reader (white, American or European would - be tourists). By positioning herself as a native and h er readers as tourists, Kincaid creates the conditions necessary to intervene in a discourse predicated upon and enforced through a particular set of looking relations. 190 privilege the image as a way to represent and interpret the world. T he modernist writers who took up the genre may have been more interested in exploring subjectivity and interiority than the landscapes they described, but they still relied on description to set the stage for their experimental investigations of self. Kinc directing her reader to focus on the voice of the narrator, rather than to dwell on long passages of careful description. Provocatively, she forces her readers into an uncomfortable relationship with the complicity with to including t he colonialism that made it possible and the late - capitalism that sustains it. Denying her readers the vicarious pleasures of armchair tourism, Kincaid deliberately disrupts the visual protocols of travel writing to replace a fantasy view. , that nice blob just sitting like a boob in your amniotic sac of the modern experience to being a her formulation, even the visual protocols of an imagined tourism are enough to transform the inspires them. Although tourism would seem to be about locating the beautiful, marvelous, or awe - inspiring in human experien ce, Kincaid suggests that it creates a subject who is just the opposite: 191 An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that, and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just paused cannot stand you, that behind their closed doors they laugh at your strangeness (you do not look the way they look); the physical sight of you does not please t hem. (17) Ultimately, the violence inscribed in tourist travel makes tourists repulsive. Physically, they are - They are the butt of every joke and the object of ridicule for natives who do not like them. For readers who are positioned disdain for tourists is a kind of confrontation with her audience. That readers continue to be challenged by the tone can be seen in the critical respons e to A Small Place but to the at she - Caribbean people should admire her for denigrating our small place in this destructively angry 192 ofte th e text and its salient post - colonial critique of tourism along with it (5 - essay offers a pragmatically useful explanation of how to position A Small Place for undergraduate readers, it also rehearses, perhaps unconsciously, the very s ame anxieties about some or most of her politics, they all express concern to some degree over the tone of he r voice. they all foreground observations about tone in their readings of her work. Despite their training as critical readers who attend to the formal, historical, and ideological implications of literary texts, the disturbs even the most sophisticated of readers. Even for readers not familiar with the critical history of A Smal l Place , a cursory glance at the back of the book affirms the centrality of voice to the text. The teaser on the back of the 2000 Farrar, Straus and Giroux paperback edition charac , disconcerting it may be to readers, is clearly crucial to the experience of reading her text. narratives she supplies readers: Do you ever wonder why some people blow things up? I can imagine that if my life had taken a certain turn, there would be the Barclays Bank, and there I would be, both of us in 193 ashes. Do you ever try to understand why some people like me cannot get over the past, cannot forgive and cannot forget? There is the Barclays Bank. The Barclay brothers are dead. The human beings they traded, the human beings who to them were only commodities, are dead. It should not have been that they came to the same end, and heaven is not enough of a reward for one or hell enoug h of a punishment for the other. People who think about these things believe that every bad deed, even every bad thought, carries with it its own retribution. So do you see the queer thing about people like me? Sometimes we hold your retribution. (26 - 27 ) Here, Kincaid does not just implicate Barclays Bank in a history of slavery but also positions readers as complicit in that history, even, and perhaps especially, if they do not want to meeting the historical violence of the slavery with the promise of future, explosive violence. Rather than simply give readers h istorical narrative but bookends historiography with her In other moments, her anger becomes even wider in scope: I cannot tell you how angry it makes me to hear people from North America tell me how - up person pa ssing by in a carriage waving at a crowd. But what I see is the millions of people, of whom I am just in which to speak of this 194 crime is the language of the criminal who committed the crime? And what can that really deed. The language of the criminal can explain and express the deed only from the - 32) It is not only the corrupt histories on which institutions in Antigua, like Barclays Bank, are built Kincaid explicitly addresses point of vi monarchy as a quaint, thoroughly benign, reminder of a time long past, a vision conjured by the - imagined parade, Kincaid sees what remains of a colonial regime she can only describe as , and language. contentious opposition forecloses any possibility for the tourist/reader to forge a simplistic writerly voice as purely problematic, however, risk replicating the troubling logic that the writer 195 is actively tryin such readings twenty - first century: that she directs her anger at her reader to strategically and purposely provoke an emotional response. a problem if identification is the only way for readers to productively engage with a text. Especially for those of us who teach textual interpretation in a college classroom, it seems relatively easy to imagine other kinds of generative reading practices. In fact, identification often poses more of a pedagogical challenge in the classroom than confusion, discomfort, or even the outright rejection of an authorial voice. Narratives that create distance between narrators and readers most often do so strategic ally to stage more self - reflexive reading practices. Forcing readers to critically engage with not only the text at hand but with the interpretive framework they bring to a text is a powerful way of prompting meta - forced to examine at least to some degree, even if that means rejecting and leaving the text? uncomfortable emotions that such a confrontation produces, would seem to be precisely closely - the reading practice that stages it as a simple, straightf orward, and above all, pleasant activity. 196 as critically self - deconstructive performative , - person address, to the way she dis - articulates tourist looking. Larkin claims that touri tourist - reading - mis - sightings of Antigua, her narrator a - is not only about mis - understanding, but about ignoring how violent global processes shape the local. narrat preoccupation becomes even more obvious in part three of the book which is dedicated entirely to describing the condition of the library in Antigua, that dusty, broken building plastered with might be saying to yourself, Why is sh e so undone at what has become of the library, why does section, however, enacts precisely the rhetorical device her imagined reader names, positioning the stor What the library means for Kincaid can be found in her childhood memory of the place: 197 But if you saw the old library, situated as it was, in a big, old wooden building painted a shade of yellow that is beautiful to people like me, with its wide veranda, its big, always open windows, its rows and row s of shelves filled with books, its beautiful wooden tables altar, taking in, again and again, the fairy tale of how we met you, your right to do the things you di d, how beautiful you were, are, and always will be; if you could see all of that in just one glimpse, you would see why my heart would break at the dung heap that now passes for a library in Antigua. (42 - 43) describes here is complicated. On the one hand, the reverence a nd silence. On the other hand, the library is also a site of encounter with England and a and not beautiful for Kincaid, just as reading is an experience at once euphoric and violent. The library becomes a site where th e past and the present intersect, often bringing Kincaid face - to - face with those people invested with colonial authority and what remains of it in relationship who used t - - 45). That the librarian and Kincaid now share a common cause in her adult life seems strange and disorienting. Similarly, the writer finds herself sharing a political 198 investment in the old library with the members of the Mill Reef Club, a colonial - era institution in Antigua and spend their Confronted by these ons with important site of reading in the book, it is also a site of encounter. Ultimately, for Kincaid, reading is a kind of violent encounter with that which is outside the reader. Why then, she seems to ask, should it necessarily be a pleasant experience? Reading incaid, one that she re - creates for her readers (36). Confronting her own readers with a voice designed to provoke an emotional response, Kincaid forces them to contend with their own reactions to her writing. For twenty - anti - travelogue has retained its relevance and Nisa Reassemblage both remain fixed Kincaid seeks to produce in A Small Place can still be freshly experienced by readers. Speaking fr Kincaid asks her readers to reject tourist travel and the 199 ethnographic gaze that tour ism produces . At the very least, she requires that readers conte nd with her point of view, one that has been marginalized or obscured for much of literary history. ----- The texts that I have examined in this chapter all suggest, to varying degrees, that paying attention to voice, rather than image, is a representati onal tactic with the potential to upend the turned observing subject, the anthropologist, filmmaker, and writer invest the voice with a transformative power to commen t upon, if not correct, the troubling visual practices of the participant - observer. When examined fr om a twent y - first century vantage point, the success of their project is ily accessible for American audiences. As late as 2000, the posthumously published Return to Nisa signaled that within academic and avant - garde filmmaking ci rcles, still remain opaque for many viewers. Undergraduates watching Reassemblage for the first time, for example, often reject the film for many of the same reasons that its early audiences did: its strategic disjunctions of sound and image make it hard t o follow and (perhaps ironically) the many images of bare - breasted African women are troubling for twenty - first century audiences . Far from understanding the film as a salient critique of anthropology, many students complain that it replicates the ethnogra phic gaze. Similarly, readers of A Small Place and end up either ignoring or missing her critique of colonialism and tourism entirely. Shifting the authority to speak about the experiences o f marginalized people from the white, male voice of the ethnographer to the voices of subjects who self - 200 does not so much solve the problems of ethnographic gazing as it introduces a new set of issues about authenticity. By suggesting the inheritance of nineteenth - century colonialism, privileging voice runs the risk of re - inscribing ethnographic looking I examine in the first and second chapter s positioned as a site where profound truth truth tellers. I t is crucial for twenty - firs t century readers to remain skeptical of any claims to narrative authority and to consider the shift toward voice as a discursive moment rather than a resolution to the problems posed by ethnographic looking. Point of view is always an artificial construct, one that can be extremely generative, complex, evocative, and compelling. Recognizing how the framer frames their work, to borrow a phrase from Trinh, is part of the pleasure of reading and watching various modes of ethnography, or culture writing. What matters is that we recognize not only how stories are told but what they reveal about the teller. 201 CONCLUSION T hroughout this dissertation I have moved back and forth between literary writing, ethnogra phy, and cinema in an attempt to demonstrate the ways that these modes of textual production, different as they may be materially and rhetorically, are intimately linked. For me, ethnographic looking does not simply connect disparate representational forms thematically or ideologically, but most crucially through form ( of vision). In other words, Moana Mornings in Mexico are not just res. Even though Moana is a film and Mornings in Mexico is a collection of travel essays, both texts try to recreate a visual experience bathing in a creek sentence - by - sentence, or whether that viewer is cinematic spectator who - by - frame. Reading is not often considered a primarily visual experience. Literary studies has theorized r eading and its effects in many ways: as a way to uncover the aesthetic principles at work in high art; as a means of creating reading subjects; as an experience of democracy; as a mode of agency; or as a complex act of cognition. For literary studies scholars, reading is a high ly artificial activity that is primarily about uncovering historical narratives or ideologies. All of this work attempts to answer the question of what literature does and how it works on readers and whether c onsciously or not, all of these theories make a case for why literary studies matters. My claim that reading is a visual process is an attempt to find new ways of interpreting how texts work. Many of the texts that I close read in this dissertation are highly canonical and come already read, inscri bed with layers upon layers of critical analysis. By framing reading as a 202 mode of seeing akin to watching a film frame - by - frame, I have tried to suggest another mode of literary analysis, one that builds upon but do es not simply repeat the ideological crit iques of ethnographic representation in its many forms. Descriptive writing does not just ask readers to imagine a scene in an ambiguous or abstract way. Instead, description is a carefully orchestrated form of writing that produces specific e ffects on rea ders. The bodies and behaviors that readers imagine may not be precisely the same, but by manipulating order and sequence, layering clauses, and playing with duration, descriptive writing in a process strikingly similar to cinema. When scholars attend to ethnographic texts, they routinely pair written and image texts, relating them thematically, historically, or ideologically. Often, image texts are used to illustrate the claims that scholars make about writing . Foucault, Said, and Mudimbe, for example, all use paintings as a point of departure to mount their arguments about how discourse creates subjects. As a scholar who is deeply invested in i mages , I find the lack of substantial commentary upon these painting s and their rhetorical effects troubling . t it possible that writing and images s hare more than simply referring to the same subject matter ? If the tidy distinctions between cinematic and literary texts continually collapse under even the slightest p ressure, they must share more than an ambiguously defined aesthetic . then, do many scholars insist on treating these textu al forms as only causally or tangentia lly related? not just adapt or respond to literature. Rather than insist, for instance, that the literary experimentation of the modernist avant - why not think about literary modernism and cinematic movements like surrealism or Soviet 203 Montage as co - emergent, related visual languages ? T wentieth - century literary and film texts, particularly the ethnographic reali sm I examine here, were a joint endeavor to organize the increasingly disjointed, fragmentary experience of industrial modernity into a seeable, knowable know ledge through a specific set of protocols for seeing and understanding what is seen. By analyzing written images and actual images together using similar strategies of close reading, I have deliberately tried to be provocative. It is time to take seriously the relationship between words and images. Students know this perhaps better than many scholars. In my aids either supplement (as the term implies) or illustrate ideas situated as coming primaril y from literary writing. Instead , I have tried to position literary and film analysis as similar methods of textual interpretation, encouraging my students to apply the facility that they already have about how films make meaning frame - by - frame to literature at the level of the sentence. 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